Volkstheater director Voges becomes the new artistic director at Schauspiel Köln

The proposal is unlikely to be rejected. The decision will be officially announced at a press conference on Tuesday.

The 51-year-old German theater maker is to move to Cologne as artistic director after his five-year Volkstheater contract has expired from the 2025/26 season. In a way, this would make an exchange of theater directors between Vienna and Cologne perfect, because the current Cologne director Stefan Bachmann will take over the Vienna Burgtheater from Martin Kušej in 2024/25. For this season, director Rafael Sanchez has already been presented as an interim director for the Cologne theatre.

Zest for action and brute pieces

Voges took over the Volkstheater with the 2020/21 season and thus at a time that was anything but easy, as the corona pandemic also had cultural life firmly under control. In addition, his start in Vienna fell in the middle of the ongoing general renovation of the house. Nevertheless, the native of Düsseldorf showed thirst for action and provided reliable topics for conversation, for example with the brute plays by the Austrian author Lydia Haider, whom he brought to the house, evenings with “Ibiza detective” Julian Hessenthaler or a focus on the fossil age.

Voges was able to show successes insofar as the Volkstheater was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen for the first time after 1970 and only for the second time in 2022 with the Jandl evening “humanistää! ein abfertigung der sparten” directed by Claudia Bauer. The play also cleared up in the annual critics’ survey of the German specialist magazine “Theater heute”. In the previous year, the Volkstheater was voted the second-best theater in the German-speaking region. In the same year there were four “Nestroy” prizes for productions in the house. Voges also reported 68 percent load factor, tripling subscribers and exceeding revenue targets in May, at the end of its first unrestricted season.

Before he was called to Vienna, Voges, who was born on May 14, 1972, had been director of the Dortmund Theater for ten years. He started out as a freelance director of drama and opera. As such, his path led him from Frankfurt to Berlin and from Stuttgart to Dresden.