Reinhardt, Max
Reinhardt, Max (1873–1943),Austrian director and theatre manager. After early work as an actor, Reinhardt bought the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1906 and soon became internationally famous as a director of great innovation and power. His inclinations were to the spectacular and his productions of Shakespeare often were lavish, as with A Midsummer Night's Dream (Berlin, 1905, the first of twelve versions) which used real trees in the forest, and The Tempest (Berlin, 1915) which relied on a revolving stage to create the illusion of shifting locales. Even at his most spectacular, Reinhardt focused on psychological truth in acting. An eclectic artist, he was influenced by Craig's designs and directed some of the first Shakespeare productions to use the modernist methods of simplification, symbol, and abstraction—as in The Winter's Tale (1904), King Lear (1908), Hamlet (1910), and an expressionist...
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