Theatres in Schumannstraße: Kammerspiele (left) and Deutsches Theater (right).

Adolf L'Arronge founded the Deutsches Theater in 1883 with the ambition of providing Berliners with a high-quality ensemble-based repertory company on the model of the German court theatre, the Meiningen Ensemble, which had been developed by Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen and his colleagues to become "the most widely admired and imitated company in Europe", thanks to its historically-accurate sets and costumes, vividly-realized crowd scenes, and meticulous directorial control.^[1]

Otto Brahm, the leading exponent of theatrical Naturalism in Germany, took over the direction of the theatre in 1894, and applied that approach to a combination of classical productions and stagings of the work of the new realistic playwrights.^[2]

One of Brahm's ensemble, the legendary theatre director Max Reinhardt, took over the directorship in 1904. Under his leadership it acquired a reputation as one of the most significant theatres in the world.^[3] In 1905 he founded a theatre-school and built a chamber theatre. Reinhardt remained the artistic director of the theatre until he fled Nazi Germany in 1933.^[2]

The Deutsches Theater remains one of the most prominent companies in Berlin.^[2]

Works cited

• Banham, Martin, ed. 1998a. "Deutsches Theater" In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521434378. p.294.
• ---. 1998b. "Meiningen company." In The Cambridge Guide to Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521434378. p.718.
• Willett, John and Ralph Manheim. 1970. Introduction. In Collected Plays: One by Bertolt Brecht. Ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Bertolt Brecht: Plays, Poetry and Prose Ser. London: Methuen. ISBN 041603280X. p.vii-xvii.

Notes

External links

• Deutsches Theater site

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