Young director:

“Theater is the best form of expression for me”

The Nestroy Award ceremony will take place on November 24 at the Volkstheater in Vienna. Lukas Michelitsch, who grew up in Deutschlandsberg, has been nominated for "The Party" (on the right, actress Marlene Hauser).

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Lex Karelly/Anna Breit)

Director Lukas Michelitsch (28) from Deutschlandsberg could win his first Nestroy Prize on Sunday. What he expects from the theater and how his background has shaped him.

Ulrike Haidacher turned her cabaret program into a novel, Lukas Michelitsch turned the novel into a play: no easy task, and yet the young director from Deutschlandsberg has succeeded. What's more, he has been nominated for the Young Talent Nestroy Award for "The Party" at Schauspielhaus Graz.

"You never expect something like this," says Michelitsch, who graduated from the Vienna Reinhardt Seminar in 2023. "It's a joy when it happens." Haidacher's novel was a "great template", "because the text is written for speaking. It's very dense and a lot happens. Of course, you have to cut some things, but we - actress Marlene Hauser, dramaturge Emily Richards and I - chose what we enjoyed the most". Incidentally, Michelitsch hardly spoke to the author in advance. "She came up to me at the premiere and joked: 'There would have been something in this and that punchline...'"

"Theaterzentrum was a great free space"
Michelitsch gained his first stage experience at the Theaterzentrum Deutschlandsberg. "That definitely left its mark on me because it was a place where young people wanted to do something. That's not a given in the countryside." From technical work to setting up the stage and tearing down tickets, everything was involved. "The TZ was a great free space where we could try out a lot of things and gain new perspectives on theater." Michelitsch now lives in Vienna, "but I still have a lot of contact with Deutschlandsberg".

What the future holds is open, says the young director. "But the means of theater are now the best form of expression for what I want to do." It is important to use the material and texts to tell something about the world we live in: "That is something that theater should always do."