Now all is at an end; my perfidy, My unjust doubts, my fatal
jealousy, Have brought me to this pass: I realise ‘Twas my crime
that caused Bajazet’s demise. Cruel destiny, are you so
unforgiving That I, condemned, alas! to go on living, Must bear, to
crown my grief, the endless shame That for my lover’s death I am
to blame? Yes, my dear prince, your death is due to me, Not
Roxane’s rage nor Amurat’s decree. Ah! for what purpose did I
love you so?

Jean Racine, Bajazet, 1672

Life consists of burning up questions.
I cannot conceive of work that is detached from life. […]
We must get rid of the Mind, just as we must get rid of literature.
I say that the Mind and life communicate on all levels.
I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.

Antonin Artaud, The Umbilicus of Limbo, 1925

Frank Castorf, who for many years was the director of the renowned Volksbühne in Berlin, has now set his sights on producing Bajazet by Racine, with a team of French performers including Jeanne Balibar. Castorf has been a provocative figure in German theatre for over forty years, famous for his directing of actors at the intersecting point between grotesque and fierce intensity, his early use of video that explored its truly dramatic energy, and his dizzying adaptations of novels – especially by Dostoyevsky, with whom he shares a taste for keen social analysis, lucid and raw, borne by the energy of the desperate. His theatre is utterly committed to freely acting and thinking; it doesn’t avoid contradiction, but it totally rejects any compromise in principles.
For the first time, and in French, he is adapting a work by Racine, a dramatist that few no Francophone artists have previously attempted. In Racine, Castorf recognises the foundation of his own theatre – the conviction that purity does not exist and that the tragedy of existence is born from the collusion between private passion and power, and between desire and contingent propositions. But they also share a belief in the power of the spoken word, theatre’s very anchor, which Racine’s heroes and heroines use to break apart the social settings that prevent them from fulfilling their desires – sexual desire and a desire for freedom – a demanding and radical spoken word, fatal if needs be. Castorf relates Racine to Artaud, another poet of vital immoderation, who uses words to extricate himself from what his birth, his body and his environment have imposed on him, in order to be reborn as himself. So from within the confines of the Sultan of Constantinople’s seraglio in Bajazet, Castorf brings together two major French poets and awakens our demons.

At 67 years of age, Frank Castorf is one of the major figures in German theatre (…). Alongside Christoph Marthaler, Christoph Schlingensief or René Pollesch, his intense, deconstructionist, post-dramatic productions have firmly made their mark. He was one of the first to have brilliantly brought together theatre and video.

Brigitte Salino, le Monde, 10.09.16

On an artistic front, the Volksbühne led by Frank Castorf was the space for a group of artists to express themselves, where each and everyone, in their own way and no matter their generation, could uncompromisingly tackle concrete aspects of the aesthetic, economic and political changes of the time.
Christoph Marthaler, Andreas Kriegenburg, Christoph Schlingensief, Johann Kresnik and Meg Stuart were described by their boss as being a league of ‘strong and radical personalities that packed a punch’. At a time when theatres are often no more than a final resting place for their director’s illusions, Frank Castorf continues to be an exception, utterly adored or determinedly snubbed.

Stéphane Malfettes, Frank Castorf: le théâtre de l’avenir, Artpress, n°330, 2007

Frank Castorf, biography