Hi, I am a theatre actor, playwright, director, scholar, teacher, etc. I am the Artistic Director of Actors Repertory Theatre Luxembourg (Actors Rep), a small professional English-language theatre company in Luxembourg. We chartered in 2012, produced our first show in 2012, and nine more since then. I have directed five of the productions thus far and acted in five. We have produced two of my plays, #WTF HAPPENED? ON THE PHENOMENON OF TRUMP, and DEAR SANTA... We have revived #WTF twice, for festivals in the US and Belgium, and revived DEAR SANTA... once. I'm currently working (among other things) on re-developing #WTF into a longer (two-act) piece. There have been some nibbles of interest in producing the revamped longer version. Those possibilities are of course on hold. As a company we are working on co-producing (post-lockdowns) another play of mine with a theatre company in the US, hoping to present it in both countries. For the current situation, we have a short web piece we want to produce. A show I was cast in at one of the big Luxembourg theatres (originally scheduled to open in three weeks) was cancelled due to the pandemic. I've been in the theatre almost my entire life, having made my professional debut as an actor when I was fifteen. I've worked on over one hundred productions, almost exclusively as an actor the first twenty years or so. In recent years I've done a lot more directing and writing. Luxembourg has a thriving film industry and I have been fortunate to work in it as an actor on occasion when an English-language production is in town. Please check us out (and like us) on Facebook and visit our (somewhat out of date) website / blog: www.ActorsRep.lu . Stay safe and well. Cheers, Erik
Introduce Yourself : Artistic Director (Theatre) by Erik Abbott
Other topics in Introduce Yourself:
Check out Trending Discussions
Register / Log In
Awesome....
Greetings, Erik. I'd love to know what the theater world is like in Luxembourg.
Hi Brian, Thanks for asking. Luxembourg has a surprisingly varied theatre scene for such a small place (998 square miles, about 550,000 people). The professional scene is dominated by French and German language productions. There are three small companies with their own spaces, two of which only produce in French. The third produces mostly in German and occasionally in Lëtzebuergesch (Luxembourgish). They have in the last couple of years done a couple of English-language shows -- don't know whether they'll continue. The main player is the Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg (Theatres of the City of Luxembourg), which operates the Grand Théâtre, a beautiful facility with a 900+ seat theatre and a flexible studio space (usually configured for about five hundred). They mostly bring in international theatre, opera and dance productions, including several in English. These are usually from the the UK and are sometimes quite high profile -- Complicité, The National Theatre, the RSC, Cheek by Jowl, the Globe, etc. Every couple of years or so they produce an English-language production that runs a couple of nights here then tours the UK. They produce at least a couple of English-language shows every season that run only here. They also operate a second facility that used to house its own company. It's lovely -- a converted monastery -- but sadly isn't used much and isn't made available for others to use very much. There is also the Théâtre National du Luxembourg (National Theatre of Luxembourg -- TNL) that has a very cool 120-seat space in a converted forge. They produce what seems like a zillion shows a year, a couple of which are usually in English. Their Director also runs a major festival in Germany and they bring a number of shows here from that. (Our first production was a collaboration with TNL.) There are several small professional groups, including a site-specific company, that have been around for a while, producing mostly in one or more of the other languages. As far as we know, we (Actors Rep) are the first professional English-language company to be based fully in Luxembourg. (There is another professional English company, but they produce mostly in London.) We're tiny, have very little money and no space, but we're growing and we're building an audience. We pay everyone and our productions are solid. About forty per cent of the population in the country is fairly fluent in English and a similar percentage of the 150,000 who commute across the three borders every day to work are as well, so the audience is here. The funding situation is OK, but not great. Like everywhere, the lion's share goes to the bigger and better-known companies. We've done OK, but haven't yet really been able to pay anyone quite at the market rate -- and we usually have to pay ourselves weeks and months after a project. There are also three main amateur groups that perform in English, all well established (20+, 30+ and 40+ years, respectively) and occasional independent projects (usually amateur). Several villages do a community play every so often and there are loads of amateur clubs and groups in all sorts of languages -- French, Portuguese, Italian, Greek, etc. There is a popular French improv group and an English improv company has recently started up. So, it's not London or New York, but there is a scene and some of us are keeping fairly busy. Cheers, Erik
Thanks for the info. Best to you.