Werner Düggelin
Werner Düggelin is a Swiss theatre director.
Life
Provenance and early years
Düggelin was born in Siebnen, a small village close to the southern end of Lake Zürich. Slightly unusually for the time and place, he was born into a family without any stated religious affiliation. The Düggelin family had been established in the socially and politically complicated Ausserschwyz region for several generations. Josef Düggelin, his father, was a cantonal councillor and, by trade, a joiner. Werner Düggelin attended schools successively in Siebnen, Engelberg, Trogen and Neuchâtel. According to one source he was required to leave both the :de:Stiftsschule Engelberg|"Monastery School" in Engelberg and the :de:Kantonsschule Trogen |"Convict School" in Trogen ) "early". Spending the final part of his school career in the Francophone west of Switzerland meant that he had to undertake his "Matura" in French rather than in one of the dialects of Swiss German which would have been his mother-tongue as a young boy. He moved on to the University of Zurich where between 1947 and 1949 he studied Romance literature and culture, "briefly, and without success". He never completed the course or received a degree. Till he reached the age of around 20, as he much later told :de:Beatrice von Matt|Beatrice von Matt, Werner Düggelin had never been inside a theatre. His first visit was to the Zürich Playhouse sitting in a box high up on the right side of the auditorium, he experienced what he described as a "coup de foudre"". He knew at once that the theatre was his vocation, not as an actor but as a director: "I cannot say what it was - it was just crazy."Zürich, Paris
He found his way into theatre by working as a lighting assistant at the Zürich Playhouse during the 1948/49 season. It was Leopold Lindtberg, the director at the Playhouse, who recommended that he should progress his career in Paris and helped with the arrangements. During 1949/50 Düggelin worked as a Theater manager at Asnières on the north-western outskirts of the French capital. Starting in 1950 he worked in Paris with the director Roger Blin on a succession of projects: "I was completely devoured by France... Blin was simply the greatest. what theatre is".Pioneer
Between 1952 and 1963 Düggelin worked as a freelance theatre director in Switzerland and abroad. Back in Zürich he worked with Blin on the German language premier of "Waiting for Godot"! At the end of 1954 they were ready to present it, which they did on the so-called "Pfauenbühne" of the Zürich Playhouse. It was Werner Düggelin who had translated the text from Beckett's English language original, and he then worked on it as Blin's production assistant. Unfortunately the good citizens of Zürich were not in a mood for the avant-garde. Ticket sales were "miserable". "The public stayed away".In the mid-1950s Düggelin started staging his own productions, starting at the "Teater am Central" in Zürich with a successful stage production of a German language stage production of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. A career breakthrough came at the Staatstheater in Darmstadt in 1957 with his Darmstadt production of Goethe's :de:Urfaust|Urfaust. It was also at Darmstadt that he directed the German language premier of Marcel Achard's "Darf ich mitspielen?". Staging productions in German of the work of non-German language dramatists has become a theme in Düggelin's career. Along with playwrights already mentioned, Düggelin has been among the first to stage German production of works by Eugène Ionesco, Georges Schehadé, Albert Camus, Jean Genet and Paul Claudel. In 1956 he directed at the Bavarian Staatsschauspiel in Munich, where his work included a memorable production of Bidermann's Cenodoxus. Over the next few years he guested as a stage director at some of the most important theatres in the German-speaking world, notably in Basel, Vienna and Stuttgart. He has also, more recently, dabbled in opera. In 1963 he staged Pinkas Braun's German language version of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" at Hamburg. It was also in 1963 that he exchanged his freelance status for a permanent position as stage director at the Zürich Playhouse, still under the overall direction of his mentor and the man who had helped him break into the world of theatre more than ten years earlier, Leopold Lindtberg.
Basel
In 1968 Werner Düggelin moved to Basel, a more culturally dynamic and diverse city than Zürich, after accepting an appointment as dorector of the City Theatre. This marked the beginning of what several commentators identify as a golden age for the Basel Theatre. Supported by an exceptional team, he oversaw a succession of engaged and politically tinted productions which caught the spirit of :de:68er-Bewegung |a new generation, provoking commentators and moving audiences to take a more frequent interest in Basel theatre productions.Grand old man
Since 1975 Düggelin has again worked on a freelance basis, regularly returning to work in Zürich and Basel, but still sometimes stepping further afield. For three years, between 1988 and 1991, he ran the :fr:Centre culturel suisse |Swiss Cultural Centre in Paris which had been set up in 1985. He is described by :fr:Étienne Dumont |Étienne Dumont as the first independent head of the centre. His predecessor, Otto Ceresa, had been a part-time director who had combined his duties with his principal job as a senior manager at Pro Helvetia. Before that, as initially configured, the centre was run on a collegiate basis by a group of six individuals.More recent productions have included Beckett's "Endgame" and Molière's "The Misanthrope", both at Zürich. A number of tribute pieces published in celebration of Düggelin's ninetieth birthday make the point thqat, despite his advanced age, he is still working at the profession he loves, his ear for the dramatists' true intent more acutely tuned than ever.
Though Düggelin is most revered as a stage direct, completeness requires mention of his television work. Some of his best recalled small-screen adaptations and productions have included "L'Histoire du soldat" by Ramuz, "The Black Spider" by Gotthelf and a "Hommage to Tinguely". Swiss artists with whom he has worked include Jean Tinguely, Eva Aeppli, Bernhard Luginbühl and :fr:Schang Hutter|Schang Hutter.