Born in Cologne, UWE ERIC LAUFENBERG has been an actor and director at the drama theaters in Frankfurt, Cologne and Zurich, later becoming chief director at the Maxim Gorky Theater in Berlin. Since 1993, he has also directed productions at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, the Residenz Theater in Munich and the Burgtheater in Vienna. He has staged operas at the Linz Landestheater (Der Ring des Nibelungen), Vienna State Opera (Elektra), Dresden Semperoper and Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu (Der Rosenkavalier), Royal Theater la Monnaie in Brussels, Berlin Komische Oper, Hamburg State Opera, etc. In 2016, the Bayreuth Festival opened with Laufenberg’s production of Parsifal. He was Intendant of the Hans Otto Theater in Potsdam (2004-2009) and the Cologne Opera (2009-2012).
Since the 2014/2015 season Uwe Eric Laufenberg has been Intendant at the Hessian State Theater in Wiesbaden. His first productions there were Richard Strauss’s operas Die Frau ohne Schatten and Herzog Blaubarts Burg, as well as the dramatic theater production of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. He has made adaptations of his own production of Mozart's Escape from the Seraglio, which has been performed in Wiesbaden, Potsdam, Cologne and Suleimaniya, Iraq. Among the operas he has staged are Othello, Così fan tutte, the complete cycle of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tannhäuser, Arabella, Mozart’s diptych Idomeneo / Titus, and dramatic performances of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Friedrich Schiller’s Don Karlos, the German premiere of Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Heinrich von Kleist’s Der zerbrochne Krug, etc. As an actor in Wiesbaden, Uwe Eric Laufenberg played in the production the role of Dr. med. Hiob Pretorius. He has also played the role of Creon in Sophocles’s Antigone, Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, and Calisto Ridgeon in The Doctor’s Dilemma. His recent productions include Puccini’s Triptych, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, and Shakespeare’s King Lear, and he has re-staged Tristan und Isolde, The Queen of Spades, and Don Carlos, as well as Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Drama Theater.
Photo: Kerstin Schomburg