Frank castorf biography

Frank Castorf, born in 1951, directed his first plays in the socialist Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR) and from the very start showed his critical mind that the reunification of Germany has not appeased. He has been director of the Volksbühne in the former East Berlin for eleven years and in all that time he has continued to embrace prose or plays into which he breathes a dose of inventive stagecraft, some of it voluntarily provocative, in order to avoid falling into the dull trap that is “theatre of consensus” and to preserve the dual function of theatre as thought-provoking and permanently rebellious.
Among the novels he has adapted are Dostoyovski's The Idiot, The Demons and Crime and Punishment as well as Bulgakov's The Master and Marguerite or Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Accompanied by a faithful troupe of actors, by stage designers, plastic artists, video-artists and playwrights, he never balks at controversy while being very careful not fall prey to his own contradictions. He continually asks questions and forces the spectators to keep their eyes and mind

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