Andrea Breth

Verbrechen und Strafe
11–14 December 2008

Andrea Breth, born 1952, studied literature in Heidelberg. After a period as assistant director at the Heidelberg Theater she first staged plays at the Bremer Theater, in Wiesbaden, Hamburg and West Berlin as well as at the Schauspielakademie and the Neumarkt Theater in Zurich. From 1983 to 1985 Andrea Breth was engaged by the Freiburg Theater. With García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba in 1985 she was invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen, where many of her efforts have since been seen. In 1985 she was also voted Director of the Year by the periodical Theater heute. In 1986 she moved to the Schauspielhaus Bochum, where among other works she staged Green’s South and Gorky’s The Last Ones. After stagings at Vienna’s Burgtheater (Kleist’s The Broken Jug and O’Casey’s The End of the Beginning) she was Artistic Director of the Berlin Schaubühne from 1992 to 1997. As director there, her productions included Schnitzler’s The Lonely Way, Gorky’s Night Asylum, Vampilov’s Last Summer in Chulimsk, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Euripides’ Orestes, Chekhov’s The Seagull and Uncle Vanya, Kleist’s The Schroffenstein Family, and Goethe’s Stella.

Since 1999 Andrea Breth has been House Director at the Burgtheater with stagings of Edward Bond’s The Sea, Horváth’s Der jüngste Tag, Kleist’s Cathy of Heilbronn, Schiller’s Mary Stuart, Albee’s The Goat or Who is Sylvia?, Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, and world premieres of Albert Ostermaier’s Letzter Aufruf and Nach den Klippen; her productions of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (2002) and Schiller’s Don Carlos, Infant of Spain (2004) were invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen. Andrea Breth’s association as a guest with the Salzburg Festival began in 2002 with Schnitzler’s The Vast Domain; in 2007 she directed Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.

As an opera director, she made her debut with Orfeo ed Euridice under Ivor Bolton at the Leipzig Opera, followed by The Bartered Bride under Stefan Soltesz in Stuttgart (2003) and Carmen under Harnoncourt at the styriarte in Graz (2005). At the 2005 RuhrTriennale, she directed the project Nächte unter Tage.

Andrea Breth has won numerous honors, among them the German Critics’ Prize (1986), the Fritz Kortner Prize (1987), the Vienna Nestroy Prize for “Best Director” (2003), and the Berlin Theater Prize (2006). She is a member of the Academy of Performing Arts in Frankfurt am Main and of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin.