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.

Elizabeth Blonzen has been teaching the subject of Role Development at the Max Reinhardt Seminar since October 2024. In the following, the actor and playwright tells mdw Magazine why Vienna is the ideal city for actors, how one goes about cultivating courageous acting personalities, and why people at the Max Reinhardt Seminar might allow each other a little something more.

After serving as the Burgtheater’s deputy artistic director, Alexandra Althoff found it important to get back in direct contact with young people working toward theatrical careers and return to the Max Reinhardt Seminar, where she’d already taught from 2013 to 2018.

Stage director and Max Reinhardt seminar professor Anna Maria Krassnigg has loads of experience directing Shakespeare’s plays. But even for this experienced director, putting on Macbeth at the Hanoi Academy of Theatre and Cinema is an adventure.

There are those people to whom, when they speak, we could listen forever—almost no matter what they say; it somehow touches us and sweeps us along. And then there are others whom we can’t follow; sitting in the theatre, we grow restless or can’t quite manage to absorb what they’re declaiming. Why is this so?

“It’s the source of my energy and existence—I wouldn’t ever want to do anything else, not even if I had a thousand options to choose from.” When Ira Süssenbach talks about her work as a stage director, her love of theatre is downright palpable. This fourth-year stage directing student at the Max Reinhardt Seminar spoke with mdw Magazine about her diploma production.

At the 2022 Reichenau Festival, Christian Berkel will make his debut as a stage director with a production of Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening) involving Max Reinhardt Seminar students. A conversation on the existential life crisis of puberty, broken homes, and the power of theatre.

After 256 years, the time had finally come: on 1 September 2021, a sold-out Schlosstheater Schönbrunn witnessed the official première of La Corona at the venue for which it had originally been composed.

“EINSITZEN – Conversations about Setting and Reflecting upon Contemporary Dramaturgies and their Residues” is an open discussion format, subject to the whims of the moment, that is organised as part of the mdw’s MAS programme Applied Dramaturgy in Music and Performing Arts. At irregular intervals, this series will bring before the microphone guests who hail from theatre, the fine arts, literature, philosophy, music, and other realms of life.

He does ask himself whether his story will really be of that much interest, says Enzo Brumm right at the beginning of our conversation. 25-year-old Brumm is an acting student in his fourth and final year of study at the Max Reinhardt seminar. As a teenager, he was in the youth club at the Ernst Deutsch-Theater in Hamburg, and he’s now returning there for a production—as a full-fledged actor in a production of Don Carlos.