Clever, Edith

(1940- )

   Actress. Clever is best known for her work with the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer. She grew up in the Rhineland but attended the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich; she thereafter had engagements through the 1960s in Kassel, Bremen, Zurich, and Munich. In Munich she met and worked with Peter Stein, whom she subsequently joined at the Schaubühne. Thereafter she achieved her most well-known work, remaining as a member of the theater's ensemble until 1979 — though she returned periodically for individual productions. In the 1970s, her roles included Warwara in Maxim Gorky's Summer Folk, Ruth in Botho Strauss's Trilogie des Wiedersehens, and Clytemnestra in Aeschylus's The Oresteian Trilogy. Clever became for audiences in Berlin the representative personality of the Schaubühne, as her stage presence struck many as riveting. It consisted of an intense psychic dislocation combined with primordial power, though in her performances her power seemed to have turned self-destructively inward. Beginning in the mid-1990s Clever began directing plays and acting in one-woman shows. Numerous critics described her solo performance of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's female figures, a collage of scenes she had assembled in 2000, as "the final chord of the Schaubühne era."