2023-05-07 09:55:28
Dhe contemporary theatre, as Robert Hunger-Bühler recently said, is currently suffering from a certain asepticism, an uneasy tendency to be sterile. What he meant by that: a climate of fear and uncertainty that prevails everywhere where people no longer ask what the theater can and wants, but only what it can and cannot do. Hunger-Bühler, who at the age of thirty embodied Beckett’s retrospective old man Krapp in Frankfurt in “The Last Tape”, was himself confronted with the question when he played a woman in Yasmina Reza’s monodrama “Anne-Marie the Beauty” (FAZ 6 October 2021). At the Zurich Schauspielhaus, where the former ensemble member was seen as Shylock, Richard III., Büchner’s Danton and Lessing’s Nathan, he had to put up with a lot of unpleasant things in a production of Milo Rau based on Pasolini’s “The 120 Days of Sodom”, but he was not allowed to embody a woman there. That didn’t fit into the concept of the house in terms of identity and representation. Hunger-Bühler was celebrated in other places for his tender embodiment of the eternal supporting actress Anne-Marie, in Schaffhausen for example or in Aarau.
Preparations for the performance: Robert Hunger-Bühler as Anne-Marie in the German premiere in Freiburg.
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Bild: Britt Schilling
He was born in the village of Sommeri-Hefenhofen in the canton of Thurgau, the son of a carpenter and a shorthand typist. He did an apprenticeship as a draftsman, studied acting in Zurich and philosophy and theater studies in Vienna. Since then he has played in almost all major German-speaking houses, in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich and Hamburg, worked with directors such as Zadek, Neuenfels, Marthaler, Grüber and Jossi Wieler and directed films himself. At the beginning of the 1990s he belonged in Freiburg, together with Anne Tismer, Manfred Meihöfer and Jürgen Rohe, to the young and not so young savages that Jürgen Kruse, formerly assistant director to Peter Stein, had gathered around him.
In Peter Stein’s “Faust Project”, in which all 12,110 verses of both parts of the drama were spoken in 22 hours, he was one of the three Mephisto actors. The role suited him. Hunger-Bühler, who can often be seen in cinemas and on television and loves the camera because it can read his mind, loves being devilishly quiet, warm-hearted, abysmal and callously cynical, demonically velvet-pawed and brokenly melancholic. An artist in acting of the smallest and smallest gestures, for whom a slow glance and a brief chin-out are enough to dominate a situation. No power actor, but an artist of delicacy and seduction, who chisels nuances and can teach fear on the quietest of feet. Today, Sunday, Robert Hunger-Bühler, who loves the theater because he loves portraying people, turns seventy.
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