Staatstheater Darmstadt

The Staatstheater sits on Georg-Büchner-Platz and runs three branches under one roof: opera, drama and dance, with the Staatsorchester Darmstadt in the pit. Two auditoriums carry the programme. The Grosses Haus seats around 950 and takes opera and large-scale drama, while the Kleines Haus, with about 480 seats, handles chamber work, contemporary dance and new writing. Smaller studio spaces take the experimental end. The foyers are wide and heavily glazed, which turns arriving and the interval into part of the evening. Theatre in Darmstadt goes back to the court of the landgraves, but the buildings kept changing. The old Hoftheater burned in the air raid of 11 and 12 September 1944. The present house opened in 1972 as a sculptural block of exposed concrete, terraces and glass, and it is one of the clearest examples of German brutalism you can walk into and watch a show in. It was planned as a theatre factory: workshops, costume and props departments, rehearsal rooms and the full stage machinery all sit inside the same building, so productions are built from scratch on site. The repertoire runs from Mozart and Schiller to premieres by living writers, with family programmes and joint projects across the Rhine-Main region. After dark the glazed foyers light up over the square, which was the point of the design. Theatre here was meant to be visible from the street.

The company had no building of its own for nearly thirty years. After the old court theatre burned in September 1944 the ensemble performed in improvised venues around Darmstadt until the present house opened in 1972. The architects glazed the foyers so the building would light up over the square at dusk, a deliberate signal that what happens on these stages belongs to the whole city.