ABSTRACT
Swiss theatre in the years before and during the Second World War registered its importance on the European scene by staging Brecht at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. For a time in the 1950s and 1960s too, the plays of Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt were among the most interesting European writing. These advantages seem to have been relinquished. Perhaps the most significant move in established theatre in the following decades was the Schauspielhaus's failure in its association with Peter Stein's politically and aesthetically innovative style (he left in the early 1970s). The story of civic theatre in Germanspeaking Switzerland largely follows the model of Intendantentheater in the Federal Republic of Germany, and economics seems to have played at least as strong a role as artistic criteria in the construction of programming: Stein could not fill the house in Zurich and left a large deficit; Zurich is a city run by bankers ...
