Trivia

In 2013, he directed a "deliberately incoherent" production of the Ring Cycle at the Bayreuth Wagner Festival, which was booed by the audience.

He has continued to expand the boundaries of theater by mixing multimedia into the performances so that parallel actions and time shifts could be shown on video screens .

From 1981till 1985 he led his own ensemble at the Theater Anklam where he came to the fore with the GDR regime through a series of unconventional classic productions: William Shakespeare's Othello in 1982, Bertolt Brecht's Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night) in 1984 and Nora after Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House 1985.

His diploma dissertation, which was formally commended, was entitled "Ground Rules for the 'Development' of Ionesco's Global Ideological Perspective and Artistic-Aesthetic Position". He made numerous culturally focused visits to Poland during this period.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he freelanced in Hamburg , Munich , Berlin and Basel.

Castorf is a German theater director and was the artistic director of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz from 1992 to 2015.

In 2016 he received "The Berliner Kunstpreis" ( officially Großer Berliner Kunstpreis, is a prize for the arts by the City of Berlin).

In the 1970s, he was strongly influenced by the playwright Heiner Müller, who inspired him to consider the theater text as a material that could be recast freely for different purposes.

In 1994 he received the Fritz-Kortner-Preis .

Castorf's father was an ironmonger.

He has staged films such as Anthony Burgess and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange in 1993 and Irvine Welsh and Danny Boyle's Trainspotting in 1997.

Between 1970 and 1972 he undertook military service with the army's National Border Force.

The prestigious magazine Theater heute has named him director of the year ten times and fourteen of his productions have been selected for the Berliner Theatertreff.

Between 1971 and 1976, he attended the Humboldt University of Berlin, studying theatrology. His teachers included Ernst Schumacher, Rudolf Münz and Joachim Fiebach.

In 1989, Klaus Pierwoß brought Castorf with a production of Hamlet to Schauspiel Köln, Cologne.

His dramatizations of novels such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Der Idiot (The Idiot) and Mikhail Bulgakov's Der Meister und Margarita(Mästaren and Margarita) - both 2002 - were total theater performances where the audience became part of the scenography.

He gained a reputation for treating the classics with complete disrespect which brought him to West Germany in 1989 where he first directed in Cologne and Basel.

From 1992 to 2015, Frank Castorf was manager and leading director at the Volksbühne in Berlin. His expressive performances are innovative and often provocative and count among the foremost in German contemporary performing arts.

Frank Castorf successfully completed his schooling in 1969/70, entering training for railway work.

His work is often associated with postdramatic theatre.