Gosch, Jürgen

(1943- )

   Director. Gosch became one of the German theater's leading directors in the 1980s, with numerous productions invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen. He began his career in East Germany, where he completed studies as an actor in Berlin. His first engagement was in Mecklenburg, but in 1967 he began working in Potsdam as both an actor and a director. He attracted attention in East and West Germany with his "breakthrough" 1978 staging of Georg Büchner's Léonce und Lena at the Berlin Volksbühne, which the East German regime strongly criticized and soon banned. Soon thereafter Gosch escaped to the West, where he began working in Hannover and Bremen. His most significant directing work emerged initially in Cologne, where his productions of Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths and Molière's The Misanthrope were widely praised. Beginning in 1984 Gosch worked steadily under Jürgen Flimm at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, and his production of Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles appeared at the 1986 Theatertreffen. In the 1990s he assumed a similar position under Thomas Langhoff at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. Gosch's 2005 staging of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was widely praised and attracted nationwide attention, including another Theatertreffen invitation.