Que peuvent les classiques ? A Conversation between Stéphane Braunschweig and Florent Masse

French director Stéphane Braunschweig, Short-Term Fellow in the Humanities Council and Department of French and Italian, will be in conversation, in French, with Florent Masse, director of L’Avant-Scène, on the relevance of the classics on the contemporary stages. Braunschweig who has dedicated a great part of his career staging classical plays by Racine, Molière, Ibsen, and Chekhov strongly believes in the power of the classics to enlighten us on the urgent questions of our times.

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Stéphane Braunschweig is one of France’s most accomplished French theater artists and a major figure in the world of French theater. He has been directing plays and operas since the late 1980s and has been at the helm of the most prestigious French theater institutions. After philosophy studies at École Normale Supérieure, Stéphane Braunschweig studied theater at École du Théâtre National de Chaillot with Antoine Vitez. His professional success as a director was immediate. From the early nineties, he started regularly presenting his productions at Festival d’Automne in Paris and started touring European capitals (London, Berlin, Moscow). In 1992, he directed his first lyrical booklet at Théâtre du Châtelet. At age 29, he was named Director of Centre Dramatique National Orléans-Loiret-Centre, where, for 6 years, he created a dozen shows presented in the renowned European festivals (Autumn in Paris, Avignon, Edinburgh, Istanbul, Rome). During this period, he developed his career internationally in the field of opera, directing works in Berlin, Venice and Brussels, but also theater: speaking English, German, and Italian, he was invited to direct plays in the original language of the host country (England, Italy and Germany).

At the start of the millennium, Stéphane Braunschweig started heading exclusively National Theaters: from 2000 until 2008 he was at the helm of Théâtre National de Strasbourg, from 2010 until 2015 Théâtre National de la Colline, and from 2016 until the summer of 2024, Théâtre National de l’Odéon. In these three major institutions, he continued to direct his favorite writers Shakespeare, Ibsen, Molière, Chekhov, Racine, Brecht, and Pirandello while supporting and producing a new generation of leading French and international stage directors such as Alexander Zeldin, Caroline Guiela Nguyen, and Simon Stone.

Stéphane Braunschweig has been a constant innovator for the French stages: in 2015, at Théâtre de la Colline, he helped create the Premier Acte program: a master class training program meant to support socio-economically and racially discriminated drama students, encourage them and help them thrive at auditions, especially for highly selective drama schools. Over the years, the program has had groundbreaking positive outcomes in French theater. Stéphane Braunschweig also innovated by seeing to assemble racially diverse casts for his productions at a time when it was still an exception.

All throughout this time as an influential cultural institution leader and celebrated theater director, Braunschweig continued to direct operas, write, translate, and stage design all his productions. He has taught acting and directing in various institutions. Braunschweig is Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Mérite, Officier des Arts et des Lettres and Commandeur of the Royal Norwegian Merit. He has also received the Copola and Prati Prize (1991) and the European Prize in Theater from The European Cultural Foundation (2005).