Theater: stage designer Bert Neumann is dead – ZEIT ONLINE

Updated August 1, 2015 00:19 clock "Share this article, save or print" data tracking google-action = "openbox" data tracking webtrekk = "hp.article.tools.openbox" title />

Stage Bert Neumann for the play “The Master and Margarita” at the Berlin Volksbühne in 2002 | © Claudia Esch-Kenkel / dpa

The stage designer Bert Neumann’s dead. He already died Thursday at the age of 54 years, as a spokeswoman for the Berlin Volksbühne announced. Neumann was especially famous for his decades-long collaboration with the theater director Frank Castorf. In addition, he developed sets for directors such as René Pollesch, Leander Haussmann and Johan Simons.

With partly multi-storey residential containers Neumann designed movable cityscapes. The theater audience he granted so cleverly insights into foreign bedrooms and living rooms. “I like it when the boundary between stage and auditorium dissolves,” Neumann said once.

One of the highlights in Neumann’s work was the New Town, which he for Castorf Dostoevsky staging The Idiot built. The audience sat in Hotel Romantic World in the middle of the rotating stage. All around a city

was constructed with fully furnished houses, supermarket, brothel, hairdresser and pub Life behind the facades and doors von Neumann’s famous bungalows could often follow only via video link -. For example, in Castorf to six-hour Dostoevsky adaptations The Demon and Humiliated and Insulted . Sometimes there was even video in the video: in Castorf’s production of Ibsen’s

The Master Builder flickered incessantly in Neumann’s residential setting with countless doors and drawers a TV hospital series with a mini-screen

In Berlin Prater Neumann had slightly altered the London Globe Theatre rebuild. He offered the three floors distributed in a closed arena viewers an unusual view of Shakespeare Rosenkriege 1-8. For Pollesch Prater Trilogy he designed a suite of rooms including porn movie set.

Neumann was born in Magdeburg and grew up in East Berlin. After a stage studies at the Art Academy Berlin-Weissensee, he worked at the Hans Otto theater in Potsdam. In 1990 he was co-founder of the graphic LSD offices in Berlin. Since 1988 worked Neumann and Castorf together.

For his work Neumann was awarded, among others, the Joseph-Kainz Medal of the City of Vienna and the Berlin Theatre Prize. Several times he was today named in the critics’ survey of the journal Theater to the stage of the year. In April he received for his “always new, radical stage inventions” the Hein-Heckenroth-stage price.

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