Ulrich Rasche
© Tobias Kruse
visceral and mesmerising
‘Rasche created a mesmerisingly pulsating Gesamtkunstwerk’
Director Ulrich Rasche is renowned for powerful opera and theatre productions that use perpetual movement and intense lighting to create visceral experiences for the audience.
He has made a speciality of Ancient Greek theatre, most recently with Agamemnon, a co-production between the Athens Epidaurus Festival and the Munich Residenztheater (2022), and Sophocles’ Oedipus at the Deutsches Theater in 2021, as well as Sieben gegen Theben / Antigone by Aeschylus and Sophocles (2017), and Aeschylus’ Die Perser, with which he made his debut at the Salzburg Festival in 2018.
Recent work includes invitations to Berlin’s Theatertreffen in three consecutive years, with Die Räuber, Büchner’s Woyzeck and Das große Heft, and he opened the 2019 season at Vienna’s Burgtheater with Die Bakchen. He returned to Salzburger Festspiele with Nathan der Weise in 2023 and directed a new production of Waiting for Godot at Schauspielhaus Bochum in 2024.
Classical music has always run through his theatrical work, though, with projects such as the choral piece Singing! (2011) and Die Entführung aus dem Serail, A Monologue after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the Sophiensælen. He directed a production of Bach’s Johannes-Passion for the Staatsoper Stuttgart, in 2023.
‘This was the first foray into the world of opera and into French-speaking territories for the German-language theatre’s favourite director, who created a visual production of dizzying mechanics’
OPER!, Elektra, Grand Théâtre de Genève
