Alvis Hermanis

Alvis Hermanis

Currently performing in: 

Alvis Hermanis, born in 1965 in Riga, has been considered as the most important Latvian director of the younger generation since the early 1990s. In the past year, in a poll run by the Swiss culture magazine, DU, 20 theatre experts voted him one of the 10 most influential European personalities in theatre in the last decade. Hermanis studied drama at the Latvian state conservatoire and since 1997 has been director of the Jaunais Rīgas Teātris (New Riga Theatre) which focuses on contemporary repertory theatre. Many of the productions which Hermanis has staged there, such as Sonja, Latvian Love, The Sound of Silence and Long Life, have played around the world and are put on at international festivals. In the German-speaking countries he has put on productions at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, Schauspiel Cologne, Burgtheater in Vienna and the Schaubühne in Berlin among others. Hermanis has received numerous awards including best actor of the year for his role as Jean in Miss Julie by August Strindberg (2004), the Montblanc Young Directors Award for The Government Inspector (2003), the European theatre award ‘Neue Theatrale Realitäten’ (‘New Theatrical Realities‘) (2007), the Nestroy Theatre Award for August: Osage County (2010) and the Konrad-Wolf-prize awarded by the Berlin Academy of Arts. His production Platonov was invited to the Berliner Theatertreffen in 2012 and his opera Gawain received intense critical acclaim at Salzburger Festspiele 2013.