Sellner, Gustav Rudolf

(1905-1990)

   Director, intendant. Sellner was best known for his stagings of Greek classics immediately after World War II, though his career as an actor, director, and intendant had begun two decades earlier. His productions applied a spare sobriety that at the time seemed novel and innovative. Unlike previous stagings of Greek classics, Sellner's eschewed grandiosity in favor of concentration on individual figures suffering the vicissitudes of fate on an unadorned stage. The approach found resonance among audiences in the immediate postwar period, largely because many in the audience had become well acquainted with suffering and grief. "Figures on the stage [in Sellner's productions] were viewed existentially, not sociologically; they did not seek to change the world but cling to what remained in a world that had changed so much" (Georg Hensel, FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung, 25 May 1990). Sellner did most of his important directing work in Darmstadt in the remains of its Court Theater. In the 1960s he became a director primarily of operas in Berlin.