A Conversation with the Stage Directing Class of 2024/25

For all of them, it began with everything standing still: the present year’s crop of graduating stage directors at the Max Reinhardt Seminar—Manuel Horak, Lukas Schöppl, and Florian Thiel—commenced their studies at the height of the pandemic. That period’s outward stasis had given rise to an inner urge to move forward—and all three, with their starkly differing life histories up to then, took and passed the entrance examination for the Max Reinhardt Seminar’s stage directing programme. These directors’ varied backgrounds are now reflected in their diploma productions, which hit the stage in the 2024/25 academic year and featured accordingly different approaches. In this interview with mdw Magazine, the three spoke about what inspired their diploma productions, the challenges they faced while studying at the Max Reinhardt Seminar, and their ideals as they now turn their eyes toward the future.

At long last, a look at the cafeteria from the inside: we meet two of our soon-to-graduate directing students at the Mensa, the mdw’s culinary centre on Anton-von-Webern-Platz—which Max Reinhardt Seminar students rarely frequent due to its distance from Penzing. “We do have a vending machine, though,” they note, putting the best face on the sustenance available at their own home base. Soon, however, such mundane things will be things of the past for these directing students: their diploma productions—of Glaube Liebe Hoffnung (Florian Thiel), Der Hofmeister – Vorteile der Privaterziehung (Lukas Schöppl), and The Artist (Manuel Horak)—were performed last semester, placing a brilliant capstone on their four years of study.

Bringing Theatre to the People

These young directors’ literary choices featured differing emphases, drawing a broad thematic arc from the romantic misadventures of a teacher in the Sturm und Drang era to a 1930s social drama as a “dance of death” and on to a graphic novel about an artist’s existence. In each case, the underlying inspiration was deeply personal and individual.

For Florian Thiel (32), it was the north German port of Bremerhaven. He deliberately situated his production of Ödon von Horvath’s famous social drama Glaube Liebe Hoffnung [Faith, Hope, and Charity] there and went on to produce it at the city’s own theatre. “I’d been searching for a format where I could connect with the people here in a special way and strike up a conversation with them, because the world here in Bremerhaven is totally different from Vienna. Here, you really do see great hardship—along with huge social and structural transformations.” In Bremerhaven, which lost its function as a central port and commercial hub following the withdrawal of American soldiers during the 1990s, society’s crises become particularly apparent. “Whenever there’s an economic crises, dockyards die. You really do feel that here,” says Thiel, who is himself from Germany. “There’s just less money, so the way culture runs is commensurately different.” The basic idea behind his diploma project was therefore to create a strategy aimed at truly bringing theatre to the people, which he accomplished particularly by way of interactive discussions with the audience following his performances.

To my mind, the family embodies a microcosm of society.

Lukas Schöppl

30-year-old Lukas Schöppl identifies the influences behind his production of the Sturm und Drang-era play Der Hofmeister – Vorteile der Privaterziehung [The Tutor – Or the Benefits of a Private Education] as lying partly in his own biography—as well as with Bertolt Brecht: “This play is a German classic that hardly gets performed anymore. Brecht adapted it during the 1950s, and I took a renewed interest in Brecht as I was preparing my own adaptation. With my production, I wanted to dust off this first-ever tragicomedy in German literature and return it to the stage.” That got Schöppl “thematically hooked”, with his own (family) history then fuelling his urge to engage with the themes of teaching and learning: “I come from a family of teachers; my parents and my two brothers all teach, and I’m the first one who didn’t do a teaching certificate. But because the themes of teaching and learning are so present in my family, I decided to deal with them in my diploma production. What’s more, character development, the things that these characters learn and can teach others, and the potential for conflict in teacher-student relationships were also things that quite naturally interest me as someone who’s about to graduate from an arts university.” A further thing that intrigued him was how family structures always also reflect society: “The relationship between the individual and society and the conflicts that arise in that regard can frequently also be dealt with and portrayed in familial contexts, as well. To my mind, the family embodies a microcosm of society, which is why people often have their first experiences of so many dependencies—or, for that matter, of this battle between the individual and the collective—in their families.”

I wanted to meld the actors with the visual arts.

Manuel Horak

Manuel Horak, 29, arrived at his diploma production of The Artist in an entirely different way. It was at an exhibition in Hamburg that he chanced to come across Anna Haifisch’s eponymous graphic novel. “I was in Hamburg last year for the Körber Festival for Young Directors, albeit only as a guest. After the third day, I was looking to take a break from the festival’s many plays. I’d seen a poster around town that simply featured this drawing from The Artist. It spoke to me quite directly, so I went straight to the Museum of Art and Design.” There, Manuel was instantly fascinated by the aesthetic of this graphic novel, which featured as part of a solo exhibition of works by the artist Anna Haifisch. And it was this book, which he then purchased at the museum shop, that inspired his diploma project. The idea of bringing a comic to the theatrical stage was something he found particularly attractive: “I felt that particularly this graphic work was downright destined for a visually powerful stage adaptation.” As he proceeded, Horak was able to bring his own fine arts background to bear: “For my graduation project at the Max Reinhardt Seminar, I wanted to meld the actors with the visual arts. It feels to me like people always talk about either visual or performing arts, but I don’t see any huge differences between them.” His penchant for this interdisciplinarity is in part due to the fact that he’d previously studied painting and animated film at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He therefore perceives zero competition between these two categories and set out to make this clear in his diploma project—which turns a graphic novel into a staged dramatisation that operates partly in the two-dimensional realm.

Of Freedom and the Imagination

Speaking with the three degree candidates about their work as stage directors, the idea of “freedom” comes up in various contexts. Manuel Horak, for example, feels freer directing for the stage than he does in film: “Personally, I experience way more freedom in live theatre than in film on account of how there’s this agreement between the audience and the performers: if we claim in some play that we’re in the Palace of Versailles, then we’re simply there. With no filming permit required,” says Horak of theatre’s ability to stake out its own reality and leave space for imagination. Lukas Schöppl, on the other hand, views freedom as often residing precisely in limitation: “I think that limitation is one of the contexts in which freedom can be found. It can often be liberating when the latitude you have to work within is predetermined for you.” He experienced this in his training at the Max Reinhardt Seminar, where he enjoyed artistic freedom but was also subject to the requirements that such a training programme entails. ”It’s a huge bit of freedom, of course, to be able to decide what projects you do. My penultimate project at the Seminar, for instance, was one where I wrote my own play—and doing so was very important to me. But for my diploma project, I took on the self-imposed limitation of not doing something I’d written myself but instead adapting a pre-existing play and enabling it to be experienced by a present-day audience.”

I never thought I’d fit into something like this.

Florian Thiel

Florian Thiel likewise shared how he, too, has a complex relationship with dramatic training and the feeling of freedom: “My studies were a bit guerrilla-like. It happened extremely often that I broke rules I didn’t even know existed.” Even so, he always felt well supported by the Max Reinhardt Seminar’s professors and department heads: “Also in terms of material: It was always so nice how it wasn’t like, ‘You now have to do something from antiquity or this or that.’ It was pretty free in that respect, and I hope it will remain so.” Thiel remarks that he’s always fundamentally viewed arts universities as fairly “insular institutions”—and that he found their “impermeability and opacity” rather off-putting at first. “I never thought that I, as a working-class kid, could fit in somewhere like this. And even now, I’m not sure that I do. But this is where I landed.” The reason was a director’s assistant job that he ended up taking on more or less by chance alongside his original profession in childcare. Working as a director’s assistant enabled him to learn a lot of the profession’s basics and experience “different handwritings”, as well. “It was fairly weird, because I hadn’t previously been familiar with such modes of work. The casts included very old actors like the now-deceased Otto Schenk, and Helmuth Lohner did the directing. It was a very special energy, there—a world in which I kind of got stuck.”

What would these young directors like to focus on in their future undertakings, and at what kinds of theatres do they want to work? Among other things, Manuel Horak can definitely imagine staging further comics—especially in light of how this special interlacing of artistic genres doesn’t often occur in theatre. That’s something he found out through the research he did for his diploma project: “We did a whole lot of preliminary research on comics in theatre and really only found two or three books on the topic.” He feels less drawn to classic stage productions, instead preferring more provocative forms: “I once really struggled to create a two-person play on Macbeth,” says Horak with a laugh. He’s more attracted to what’s often called “in-yer-face theatre”—exemplified by the play Shoppen und Ficken (Shopping and Fucking), which he chose for his penultimate student production: “It’s just really extreme, at many points taking on themes like drug abuse, prostitution, and affluent neglect—which is all stuff that I’d like to continue dealing with in the future.” Horak is now especially looking forward to the 28th edition of the Körber Festival for Young Directors, to take place from 28 May to 1 June in Hamburg, where he’s been invited to present his diploma production. “The very event that led me to discover The Artist last year has invited me back with my theatrical adaptation of this comic,” says Horak with a sparkle in his eyes.

For Lukas Schöppl, too, things have come full circle: in terms of his career following graduation from the Max Reinhardt Seminar, he expects some initial uncertainty due to the currently difficult funding situation. “One can view that as a challenge, though—and, in a certain sense, as a limit to freedom that’s ultimately liberating,” says Schöppl with an ironic chuckle. “So I’ll see what interests me and what I think might interest others, and I’ll then attempt to figure out something where those overlap.”

For Florian Karl Thiel, it’s clear: when he dreams of theatre, it’s “theatre characterised by dialogue that doesn’t say, ‘Here we are onstage to do something top-down’, but instead contains some kind of tie-in for everyday people.” And as already seen in his diploma production of Glaube Liebe Hoffnung, one can achieve the ideal of dialogue-theatre above all “by shifting to a different space—which can be accomplished through your selection of a theme. And it can also, in fact, be done by way of conversations.” In this, what’s important to him is that theatre-makers refrain from viewing themselves as part of the “cultural elite” and constantly telling each other how great they are. To Thiel, the main thing—and also the political thing—in doing theatre is ultimately “making contact with the world and entering into dialogue every day.”