Her vocation, like her curse, is greatness.

First, she loves big things.

Secondly, she dares to do big things.

That's why – thirdly – ​​Andrea Breth is already too big for the current theatre.

Because she towers - Zadek, Grüber, Bondy, Brook and Chéreau are unfortunately no longer alive - alongside Peter Stein as a brilliant remnant member of the former European humane world theater genius phalanx far beyond the G'schaftlhuber scene of German theater as a dramaless, for this screaming and morally fed up activist actual fashion institution.

Andrea Breth's theater has always been somehow out of date.

Because it creates unprecedented freedom: for the unheard of.

No dramatic couple, for example, talks so much about love as Schiller's Ferdinand and Luise in "Kabale und Liebe", they read each other from beautiful books that you have learned by heart: love as a reading art.

The two never meet - except in words.

But then, in December 1984, they entered the stage of the Freiburg City Theater, took each other's hands, started to endlessly slowly savored swings and glided through a high, apparently empty stage set by Gisbert Jäkel, whose walls here and there revealed labyrinthine niches, like figure skaters , accompanied by the slow movement from Mozart's "Jupiter" symphony.

But without letting them know their beautiful, tall,

wild tongue.

So the two of them seemed entirely from Schiller and entirely from today.

As if they were just invented.

The young director, who was born in the Allgäu, grew up in Darmstadt and was socialized through literature. After she had broken off her English and German studies in Heidelberg, where she then preferred to throw herself into the arms of the local municipal theater while sitting in, she worked as an assistant director and started directing in Bremen a crushing defeat and a triumph behind them.

The defeat in the form of a staged arrogance with an "Emilia Galotti" in the Berlin Freie Volksbühne.

The triumph with the invitation of their Freiburg production of "Bernarda Alba's house" to the Berlin Theatertreffen.

She got noticed early.

And it was noticeable that she didn't fit into the theatrical mainstream.

Because where the directors' theater of that time was in the last delirium of a collective ice age, the young director proved

struggling for a Schiller from within, not from without, that Luise and Ferdinand didn't have to fit into the general Ice Age again - but that ice and cold were their very special, own great possession.

Not her little cliché.

Two wonderfully ghostly Chekhov productions

It was also a curious joy to see each other again when, almost thirty years later, Ibsen's tragi-comic sisters Ella and Gunhild in the Schauspiel Frankfurt did not shake hands in reconciliation over the corpse of John Gabriel Borkman, who had frozen to death in snow and ice (John Gabriel had the beloved Ella sold to a stock market shark and married the unloved Gunhild).

Rather, the two of them crawled around with the haunted dead man as grotesque, insect-like creatures in a landscape of ice and moon suddenly breaking out of the salon floor.

Hilarious to look at, to sympathize with.

So it seemed as if Andrea Breth had simply continued the story of Luise and Ferdinand – in a different world of drama.

And it was as if Ibsen had written the director a letter

in which he revealed his not-so-secret character wishes to her.

Which she meticulously took at his word: by taking the poet's words.

But that's what really got him talking.