Thom Luz

Source: Thom Luz

Thom Luz, born in Zurich, studied at the Zurich University of Music and Theatre and directs both in the independent scene and at municipal and state theatres and opera houses in Switzerland, Germany, France and Belgium, including the Deutsches Theater Berlin and the Staatsoper unter den Linden, the Schauspielhaus Hamburg, the Wiener Festwochen and the NT Gent. His productions tour internationally and have received numerous awards, including three invitations to the Berlin Theatertreffen. Luz received the Swiss Theatre Award in 2019. From 2015 to 2020, he was resident director at Theater Basel and has been resident director at Munich’s Residenztheater since the 2019/2020 season. There he most recently staged WARTEN AUF PLATONOW after Anton Chekhov.

Luz’s shimmering, highly musical works of stage art have been described as a theatre of sounds, fleeting phenomena and unusual changes of perspective: Whether he is retelling Goethe’s Werther backwards in Basel, bringing together loose sentences from Franz Kafka’s notebooks to create a surprising soundscape under a floating piano in Hamburg or letting a group of lonely singing piano tuners haunt the empty opera house in Berlin – his atmospheric theatre evenings always depart from the usual patterns of perception. They invite us to rediscover supposedly familiar stories, tell of the cosmos of decline, despair, decay and the exhaustion of the world – but are never bleak, on the contrary, they are full of quiet humour and magically beautiful theatrical images. Till Briegleb summarised in the jury text of the Berlin Theatertreffen: “Thom Luz is a master of subtle differences. His stage characters are experts in the peculiar, resisters against fixed ideas, dissidents of reason and its value machine of goods and numbers. That is why his foggy evenings are something like musical airmail. They somehow send their beautiful messages with nothing, through nothing, on nothing. At least with nothing tangible. That is his floating redefinition of comedy.”
Thom Luz lives in Basel.