Noelte, Rudolf

(1921-2002)

   Director. Noelte returned from military service in World War II to work as a directorial assistant with Jürgen Fehling, Karl-Heinz Martin, Erich Engel, and Walter Felsenstein in Berlin. His directorial breakthrough came in 1948 with the first Berlin production of Wolfgang Borchert's Draussen vor der Tür (The Outsider). In many ways he remained a Fehling disciple his entire career, staging dozens of productions in the 1950s and 1960s in the Fehling manner. That meant staying faithful to the playwright's text but embracing abstraction as a means of illuminating it. Noelte also cultivated a reputation for exactitude, and many actors in the 1980s described him as a "fearsome" figure, a "difficult" colleague with whom to work; as a result, he was seen as a figure from the "old school" of directors in the 1920s. He nevertheless won widespread praise for his work, earning nine invitations to the Berliner Theatertreffen between 1965 and 1984. Noelte worked consistently as a freelance director in dozens of venues, most notable among them the Thalia and the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg; the Kammerspiele and the Bavarian State Theater in Munich; and the Renaissance Theater and the Freie Volksbühne in his native Berlin. Noelte staged nearly every play in the German dramatic canon, but was known particularly for his work with Carl Sternheim's comedies. He was also a gifted director of plays for television.