Christopher Rüping

Christopher Rüping is a theatre director who specialises in creating productions that are as tender as they are exuberant, in which the actors can interact freely with each other and the audience. He was resident director at the Münchner Kammerspiele from 2016 to 2019 under the directorship of Matthias Lilienthal. Christopher Rüping’s productions are powerful theatrical experiments in which the actors are always given centre stage. Instead of focussing on developing an easily identifiable directorial style, he is always on the look­out for new experiences, experimenting with new forms and conceptual approaches which allow him to express very personal and modern perspectives on both classical and contemporary material. His production Miranda July’s The First Bad Man, which will also be presented as part of the Schauspielhaus Zürich repertoire, is thus an airily light, tragi­comic and feminist evening, whose construction is free and transparent, allowing the actresses to treat the audience like their partners in crime. With Drums in the Night, Rüping has fundamentally transformed the way of dealing with Bertolt Brecht’s texts on stage, by taking the history of the 100-year­old play as the explicit starting point and an integral part of his production. Dionysos Stadt, his celebration of the Greek classics, creates such an all-encompassing experience of theatre as a communal space, that you start looking forward to further such events long before the 10­-hour­-long performance has come to an end.

In 2021, the production was awarded with the NESTROY Prize, named production of the year by Theater heute and he was invited five times already to the Berliner Theatertreffen.