Theatre King of Playwrights: Claus Peymann (1937-2025)
Thomas Irmer*
With the death of Claus Peymann on July 9, 2025, one of the most influential figures in German theatre has left the stage. As a director and artistic director, Peymann was an ally of Austrian playwrights in particular: Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Elfriede Jelinek, and Peter Turrini. For decades, he held together a gifted troupe of actors that included Gert Voss, Ilse Ritter, Kirsten Dene (whose surnames Bernhard used for one of his plays, which is Siblings in English translation), and Traugott Buhre. He also discovered and developed young talents such as Sabin Tambrea and many others, for which he demanded, as one of his original cultural policy demands, a training levy from television and the film industry to be paid to theatres. Sometimes loud and boisterous, Peymann once referred to a Berlin culture senator as a “gypsy baron,” after Johann Strauss‘s operetta, and attributed to himself and the Berliner Ensemble, which he directed from 1999 to 2017, the significance of a “fang in the ass of the powerful.”
Like Peter Stein and Peter Zadek, Peymann was one of the declutterers of West German theatre, previously characterized by a timid post-war conservatism. With his partner Hermann Beil playing a key role, Peymann developed new dramaturgies for classics, yet he also staged world premieres by authors of his own generation, especially Bernhard and Handke. Thus, Peymann’s theatre enjoyed a golden age spanning four decades, with stops in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Bochum, the Burgtheatre in Vienna, and finally the Berliner Ensemble.
Germany’s most intellectual entertainer, Harald Schmidt, had been a lifelong fan since his school days, and devoted entire episodes of his late-night shows to Peymann’s theatre and the personnel, such as Gert Voss, with his story as a parrot voice actor in the world premiere of Thomas Bernhard’s Immanuel Kant.
Born in Bremen in 1937 into an authoritarian National Socialist family, Peymann made his breakthrough with the premiere of Peter Handke’s play Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience) in Frankfurt am Main in 1966, a milestone in theatre history. He was associated with Handke throughout his life, staging premieres of more than half of his dramatic works. Handke once ridiculed him in Norway at the presentation of the International Ibsen Prize; as he said, “People keep asking me, ‘Why are you still with this Peymann?‘ And I answer them, ‘Never change a losing team!‘ “ Yet the director, who usually knelt before his authors, opted for modest self-irony instead of pushing back.
For the young Peymann of the post-war period, there is a remarkable school entry: “Claus burps and looks around triumphantly.” It appears that a youthful Peymann was already influenced by the anti-authoritarianism in a community, together with the joy of a successful performance reflected the applause of the audience. When the play, the actors, and the audience’s emotions were all synchronized, truly great theatre was the result, as in Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht in Bochum in 1982. With Gert Voss in the title role, wearing a guerrilla-style beret, the performance was most likely Peymann’s best production, bearing his signature style throughout his long and eventful career.
The play Die Hermannschlacht, which narrated the liberation struggle of Germanic tribes, was considered by many to be contaminated by Nazi propaganda when it was written in 1808 as a call to rise up against the occupation of Napoleon. Peymann transformed it into a play that in turn evoked the conflicts in the period after the German Autumn of the RAF, nowadays thought of as and what we would today call the postcolonial struggles in what was then known as the Third World. Everything was clear and transparent, even humorous in places, and the battle scenes were impressively choreographed as a kind of warrior ballet with shields. It was a triumph that lasted up to his appointment at the Burgtheatre in Vienna.
As artistic director, especially during his time in Bochum (1979-1986), Peymann was extremely generous and even allowed aesthetics that he himself said he did not understand. The directing duo of Manfred Karge and Matthias Langhoff attracted so many GDR emigrants to the Ruhr region that Heiner Müller, who premiered several plays there, appreciatively remarked that there was much more GDR theatre in Bochum than in Leipzig.
Peymann probably enjoyed his finest period as artistic director at the Burgtheatre in Vienna from 1986 to 1999. Here, too, the focus was once again on clearing out the outdated theatre business and the delayed process of coming to terms with Nazism. The premiere of Thomas Bernhard’s Heldenplatz in 1988 and beyond preoccupied the entire Alpine republic. Peymann had gradually become an absolute god of the theatre whose creations were closely scrutinized by the tabloid press because of their social significance.
However, he was unable to fully succeed in this role of omnipotence in the new, old capital of Berlin, where he succeeded Bertolt Brecht at his theatre. He brought together the best directors of his generation at the Berliner Ensemble – Peter Zadek, Peter Stein, Robert Wilson – and staged Shakespeare in Thomas Brasch’s new translations, but critics spoke of a well-run theatre museum of styles that were considered revolutionary in the 1970s and 80s. Peymann, on the other hand, pointed to attendance figures in the upper 90 percent range as an indisputable triumph, alongside his achievements as a Bernhard director and acting patriarch of the 1968 generation.
But other aspects of his work are impressive as well. Claus Peymann was also a theatre critic, but not in the sense of reviewing individual performances, which he read very thoroughly and evaluated in the case of his own shows, as is well known. Rather, Claus Peymann commented on the state of theatre in his respective era. No other director has distinguished himself as much as Peymann with his statements on this subject. The enlightened position of resistance that he attributed to the theatre was always clear. But his polemics against others and his self-assurance that his own work represented the very best that was possible at the time were also evident. He also had cultural policy in mind, and in this respect it would be more accurate to say that as a theatre critic he focused his attention on the entire operating system that makes theatre possible.
It is worth taking a look at Peymann’s relationship with the Berlin Theatretreffen, to which he was invited a remarkable total of 17 times. Beginning with a double invitation in 1969 (Handke’s Kaspar and his experimental pantomime Das Mündel will Vormund sein from Frankfurt’s Theatre am Turm and Oberhausen) to the heyday of his Thomas Bernhard premieres, his Stuttgart Faust and the legendary Bochum Hermannsschlacht, the impressive series of appearances at the parade of the best productions ended in 2001 with Shakespeare‘s Richard II from the early days of Peymann’s directorship at the Berliner Ensemble.
The following year, when the BE came away empty-handed, Peymann hastily organized a rival theatre festival at his theatre, announcing it as “the only true theatre festival.” Although the special program of guest performances could not be established on a permanent basis, the annual selection of the best productions repeatedly became a topic of Peymann’s polemics against the theatre world. In 2012, he even called for the festival to be abolished, not only because its historical raison d’être, West Berlin’s cultural isolation, had long since ceased to exist, but also because Peymann, who had been artistic director of the Berliner Ensemble for just as long as he had been director of the Burgtheatre, could no longer recognize any artistic merit in the invited productions by younger directors. The fact that theatre thrives on aesthetic and social change became increasingly inaccessible to him, whose greatness and now legendary status were based precisely on this quality in the post-1968 era. He had long skillfully balanced the contradiction of being both a theatre maker of provocative political enlightenment and the director of Thomas Bernhard’s skeptical view of the immutability of the world. But now the situation was becoming more complicated and at the same time more clear-cut, as a rejection of what comes after him and what has already come.
For example, Peymann devised a rather controversial performative concept for Berlin premieres. He always ordered a ticket in the fifth or sixth row at the very edge of the stalls. If he didn’t like the production, which was often the case, he would leave after about twenty minutes, visible to most of the audience. The critic, charged with his own theatre history, didn’t have to say anything more. But his early departure was, of course, very arrogant and, above all, ignorant. Similar to the Theatretreffen, he saw only incompetence in these theatre visits, especially in the acting, compared to his ensemble stars such as Gert Voss and Kirsten Dene, who had fallen on hard times. In his rejection of the younger generation in Berlin, he only accepted Frank Castorf, who, however, had gone down the wrong path. The message in his apparently carefully planned, but now rarer interviews was always the same: No one can hold a candle to me.
As a result, during his tenure as artistic director of the BE, his relationship with the press deteriorated. Peymann had always seen the press as a key component of his theatre world, even though it was useful to him primarily as a means of expressing opposition, as was often the case during his time in Vienna.
In Berlin, on the other hand, his strong reaction to public opinion, which Peymann had always taken as confirmation of his work, turned into a cool confrontation between a renowned theatre director and the capital’s press, which he believed was hostile toward him. Peymann became more thin-skinned, raged about the Berlin newspaper’s scathing reviews, and classified them as part of what he saw as the general decline of theatre culture.
As a critic of contemporary theatre, Peymann had ultimately become an aggressive defender of his own interests, encouraged by the impressive numbers of spectators at his productions. Yes, in this respect, the Berliner Ensemble was a competently run theatre, where, in addition to the works of its theatre-loving landlord, one could experience above all the dignified productions of his fellow directors Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, Robert Wilson, Thomas Langhoff, and Luc Bondy, as well as those of the octogenarian George Tabori, who remained active until his old age. That was certainly no small feat.
Indeed, theatre history will most likely remember Claus Peymann for this final phase of his work as well, during which he insisted on maintaining high standards after his theatrical breakthroughs in German-language theatre.
*Thomas Irmer is editor-in-chief of the monthly Theater der Zeit in Berlin. He has published books on Luk Perceval, Frank Castorf, and most recently, Arbeit. Brecht. Cinema. Conversations with René Pollesch (Verlag Theater der Zeit).
Copyright © 2025 Thomas Irmer
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #32, December 2025
e-ISSN: 2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
