Grüber, Klaus-Michael

(1941- )

   Director. Grüber is most closely associated with the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer during the 1970s, but his many productions outside Germany since that decade have established him as a director of international consequence. The son of a pastor, Grüber began theater studies in Stuttgart after school graduation. He holds the distinction among German directors as one of the few who began a professional career by working first in Italy before returning to establish himself in Germany; he arrived in Italy in 1964 to work under Giorgio Strehler (1921- ) at his Piccolo Teatro in Milan.

   Grüber's first professional engagement as a full-time director in Germany came in 1969 under Kurt Hübner in Bremen, where his most noteworthy directorial effort was Shakespeare's The Tempest. Subsequent productions in Düsseldorf and Frankfurt am Main followed, but his most well-known efforts came under the auspices of the Schaubühne, for whom he staged Winter Journey in the Berlin Olympic Stadium. He added numerous other popular Schaubühne productions to the company's repertoire, including plays by Ödön von Horvâth, Bertolt Brecht, Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, and Eugène Labiche, though none with the sensational attraction of Winter Journey. His production in a Parisian church of an adapted version of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Faust, titled Faust-Salpêtrière, won widespread approval among the French in 1975. His 1982 adaptation of Faust for the Berlin Freie Volksbühne was not so fortunate, however; most German critics condemned it, especially those with a devotion to Goethe. Grüber returned to Paris in 1985, where a prodigiously popular production at the Comédie Française of Jean Racine's Bérénice gained him additional favor among French critics and audiences.

   Grüber's reputation recovered in Germany during the late 1980s with outstanding productions in Munich, at the Salzburg Festival, in Vienna, and in Frankfurt am Main. His opera productions have also been widely praised, but his theater productions have earned him seven invitations to the Berliner Theatertreffen, and he has staged plays on a regular basis throughout Europe. Grüber was awarded the Kortner Prize in 1995, and when he was awarded the Konrad Wolf Prize in 2000, the jury praised his "thirty-year-long resistance to superficiality," while noting that in every production, "Grüber's attempts to experience anew what the theater can be."