Eysoldt, Gertrud

(1870-1950)

   Actress. Eysoldt was best known for her androgynous portrayals of Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Lulu in Erdgeist (Earth Spirit), both under Max Reinhardt's direction. In them she was the abandoned yet resourceful waif, "the kind of child-like actress who fascinated Reinhardt his entire career" (Edward Braun, The Director and the Stage [New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982], 96). Julius Bab described her as "sexless and gaunt, with the pointedly moving body of a boy and the volatile, menacing mien of a cat" (Die Frau als Schauspielerin [Berlin: Oesterhold, 1915], 76). For Reinhardt, she also played female roles in which she left no estrogenic doubt whatsoever, including Oscar Wilde's Salome, August Strindberg's Miss Julie, and the title role in his world premiere of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Elektra. In those roles, she played diametrically opposite the traditional coquette of Jenny Gross or the soubrette of Marie Geistinger. Eysoldt realized that the difference between herself and her predecessors lay in "exaggerated stylization," which "reminded men of their impotence, exploiting their lack of will power, [and] making [her characters] naively dangerous" (Gottfied Reinhard, Der Liebhaber [Munich: Knaur, 1973], 132).

   Eysoldt began studies in music at the Royal Music School in Munich and debuted at the Munich Court Theater in 1890. When she played Hedda Gabler in a 1907 Reinhardt production opposite Friedrich Kayssler as Lovborg, the atmosphere was charged with her complete domination of Kayssler, making his gruesome suicide in a whorehouse seem foreordained. Eysoldt remained a member of the Reinhardt company while concomitantly performing Hedda, Salome, Lulu, Elektra, and Miss Julie in Dresden, Stuttgart, and her native Munich until 1920. In that year she became manager of the Kleines Theater in Berlin and its principal director, while continuing to teach at Reinhardt's acting school in the Deutsches Theater.

   In 1986 the city of Bensheim, along with the Deutsche Akademie der Darstellenden Künste (German Academy of Performing Arts, located in Bensheim), began yearly to award the Gertud Eysoldt Ring to an actor or actress who, in the opinion of a jury, had created the most outstanding performance in a German theater of that season. Recent winners have been Ulrich Matthes in 2004 for his portrayal of George in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Deutsches Theater Berlin; Dörte Lyssewski for her portrayals in 2003 of Charlotte in Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Clavigo and the title role in Hedda Gabler at the Schauspielhaus Bochum; and Michael Maertens in 2002 for the title role in Arthur Schnitzler's Anatol at the Akademie Theater in Vienna. The prize carries with it a 10,000-euro emolument.