Alexandra Althoff, dramaturge and former artistic director of the Burgtheater, assumed leadership of the mdw’s Max Reinhardt Seminar on 1 March 2024. She and Steffen Jäger, who serves as her deputy head, speak about these new responsibilities, the challenges and planned emphases during their term in office.

For the current academic year of 2023/24, director Sarantos-Georgios Zervoulakos is teaching as a visiting professor of drama directing at the Max Reinhardt Seminar—which is not the first time he’s returned to the institution where he originally studied. Then as now, what he values most of all about the Seminar is Max Reinhardt’s concept of an ensemble that allows actors and directors to “grow up” in an atmosphere of close interaction and mutual inspiration.

Just what is it that underpins the actor’s craft? Anja Thiemann, a professor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar since March 2023, provides mdw Magazine with some insights into her work with first-year acting students, her multifaceted career, and her efforts to put suppressed women authors back in the spotlight.

The plot of Olivia Scheucher’s diploma production at the Max Reinhardt Seminar plays out amidst the world of the Austrian Armed Forces—which isn’t an alien environment for this graduate of the drama directing programme.

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?

In the series “What do the arts have to do with the Earth’s climate?”, the “Green mdw” initiative is inviting concerned individuals to speak out on their personal approaches to this issue. Maria Happel, born in Spessart, Germany in 1962, joined the ensemble of the Burgtheater in Vienna following engagements in Cologne, Hannover, and Bremen between 1991 and 1999.

“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.

For several years, now, the Standing Conference on Actors’ Training (Ständige Konferenz Schauspielausbildung – SKS) has been organising central auditions for the German-speaking region’s acting schools. At these events, students from the current year’s graduating classes present themselves to specialist audiences with an eye to landing engagements at the region’s various theatres. In the following, students from the graduating class of 2022 provide us with some impressions of their whirlwind trip to Neuss, Berlin, and Munich for the graduate auditions known as the Absolvent_innen-Vorspiele.