Theater landscapes

The house was built between 1883 and 1886 in the style of the Italian Renaissance directly on Lake Schwerin. The year 1918 saw the end of the court theater in Schwerin. The last Duke of Mecklenburg, Friedrich-Franz IV, had left for Denmark and political power was taken over by the new bourgeois-democratic government. A new era had begun: the era of the Landestheater and, since 1926, that of the Staatstheater. The hope of seeing freer artistic work in Schwerin, which had arisen with the revolution in Berlin, faded with the political development of the Weimar Republic. After the Nazis came to power, the focus was mainly on comedies and operettas. Beethoven's "Fidelio" was performed for the last time in 1944.

From 1949, Edgar Bennert, one of the survivors of the Sachenhausen concentration camp, took over the directorship of the theater for ten years.
With a view to creating a socialist national theater, he wanted to forge closer links between artists and the working classes and therefore relied on performances in the districts and had theater buses bring visitors from all over Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to Schwerin.
When Christoph Schroth took up the post of theater director in Schwerin in 1974, the Schwerin-Süd industrial complex had just been built following an SED party conference resolution to raise the material and cultural standard of living in the region.
According to Schroth's maxim "Where I am, there is no province", the upheaval in this district represented a challenge, and he focused on three lines of repertoire: Contemporary drama, especially that from the GDR and USSR, popular theater and the cultivation of the classical, humanistic heritage in order to win over the new audience.
In the "Discoveries" series, the classics of antiquity and modernism were presented to the audience.
For the 30th anniversary of the GDR, Goethe's "Faust" was performed as a six-hour production that caused a sensation.
The theater led by Christoph Schroth was one of the most exciting ensembles in the GDR with guest performances throughout Europe.

The transition to the period after reunification was no easy matter.
Of the 530 employees, 200 were made redundant over the last fourteen years.
In the 1990s, the Schwerin Theater became known above all for Ernst M. Binder's world premieres of Einar Schleef plays, which were dedicated to coming to terms with the history of the GDR.
In 1993, artistic director Joachim Kümmritz launched the annual castle festival, which brings many visitors from Hamburg and Berlin, Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony to Schwerin.