It was April 2015, when the Munich audience was watching the theatre, and the theater suddenly looked back.

With a clear view.

exploring.

Disarming.

Now what? it asked, catching the audience laughing liberatingly.

And now? it asked, seeing her dismay.

The theater and life - on this evening in the Marstall of the Bavarian State Theater they spoke in dialogue.

The actor Manfred Zapatka was one of five first-person actors who told their own, authentic, absurdly bitter European story in Milo Rau's "The Dark Ages".

And that's exactly what his was about: a life for the stage.

That evening there was a stage for his life.

Only highlights: a baby with smoke inhalation in the Bremen bombing raids in 1945;

a distant observer of his family's later rifts;

an actor whom his bewildered mother believed dead after being shot in a TV movie, and who only discovered his father's pride after his death when he found the reviews: 'They were cut out and filed in files.

From the beginning.

Even my very first criticism at drama school.”

Clear, friendly look

Did Zapatka enjoy this performance?

Or another?

Was this one special or: another one more?

It's hard to tell.

Manfred Zapatka's presence, whether on stage or in film, whether as a shady villain, critical zeitgeist or touching head of the family, is never in question.

He always appears to his audience with just that challenging self-image, as if he were asking with a clear, friendly look from his narrow eyes: And now?

Today Manfred Zapatka is 80 years old.

He spent quite a few of them in Munich – after living through his era with Claus Peymann at the Staatstheater Stuttgart.

Whether in the Kammerspiele or then, returning in 2009 after ten years, at the Residenztheater: most of them together with artistic director Dieter Dorn.

In the summer of 2019, as if he knew that a pandemic would soon paralyze the industry, he declared his career over after 55 years, but returned to the stage this year to perform in Karin Henkel's Thomas Bernhard production on German to play at the Berlin Theater.

Numerous film projects connect him with the director Romuald Karmakar.

Both won the Grimme Prize in 2002 for “The Himmler Project” – the experimental, minimalist, oppressively cool three-hour concentrate of a secret speech by Heinrich Himmler.

In 2009 he received the Bavarian Television Prize;

In the same year, the accomplished speaker was also awarded the German Audio Book Prize for his sovereign and versatile interpretation of the "Iliad": The "span of his pitches" was the reasoning, and "his sense of tempi and pauses opens up the great work “.

Tasso, Platonow, Clavigo, Hamlet - numerous classical title roles also characterize Zapatka's theatrical path, which began in 1962 at the drama school in Bochum.

And in April 2015, while he was sitting on the stage in Munich's Marstall as his own narrator, he recited it again: Hamlet's deeply doubting monologue about the masterpiece Man.

He seemed important to him, or maybe even: a part of him.