Barrie Kosky’s Transnational Theatres

This book, the first of its kind, surveys the career of the renowned Australian-German theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky. Its nine chapters provide multidisciplinary analyses of Barrie Kosky’s working practices and stage productions, from the beginning of his career in Melbourne to his current roles as Head of the Komische Oper Berlin and as a guest director in international demand. Specialists in theatre studies, opera studies, musical theatre studies, aesthetics, and arts administration offer in-depth accounts of Kosky’s unusually wide-ranging engagements with the performing arts – as a director of spoken theatre, operas, musicals, operettas, as an adaptor, a performer, a writer, and an arts manager. Further, this book includes contributions from theatre practitioners with first-hand experience of collaborating with Kosky in the 1990s, who draw on interviews with members of Gilgul, Australia’s first Jewish theatre company, to document this formative period in Kosky’s career. The book investigates the ways in which Kosky has created transnational theatres, through introducing European themes and theatre techniques to his Australian work or through bringing fresh voices to the national dialogue in Germany’s theatre landscape. An appendix contains a timeline and guide to Kosky’s productions to date. 

James Phillips is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. His research interests are aesthetics, political philosophy and their interaction. He is the author of Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry (2005) and The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant (2007) and the editor of Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema (2008), all of which came out with Stanford University Press. His most recent monograph is Sternberg and Dietrich: The Phenomenology of Spectacle, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.John R. Severn is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University, working on an Australian Research Council-funded project on the cultural and economic value of theatre in Australia. His wider research focuses on adaptation, theatre, opera and musical theatre, and community. He is the author of Shakespeare as Jukebox Musical, and co-editor with Ulrike Garde of Theatre and Internationalization: Perspectives from Australia, Germany and Beyond (both Routledge). His journal articles explore the ways operatic and musical adaptations have engaged with community inclusion from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries.