Anatomical Theatre
Riphahnsaal
4.9.–13.12.2026

By Andreas Selg with Fabienne Boldt and Emanuel Rossetti

Where the Stage Ends
Valérie Knoll in conversation with Andreas Selg

You describe the Anatomical Theatre as a “theatre without theatre”. How should we look at this strange structure, which is something that it is not?

By “theatre without theatre” I mean “theatre without drama”, or rather: a theatre without acting. What interests me are the other roles: direction, dramaturgy, stage design, masks, props, the dialogue behind the scenes … in short: I am interested in the entire apparatus, theatre in its skeletal form. That is what the “play” shows: the audience can go onto the stage and behind it. As for the question of how we should look at this structure: like an exhibition.

The title already hints at it: this is a theatre that differs from the ordinary stage play. What were your thoughts on the title?

The anatomical theatre is the room, usually a lecture hall of the medical faculty, where dissections of corpses are performed. So, the anatomical theatre is not a theatre but a place of scrutiny. The place where the interior is brought to light. Initially, I liked the acoustic proximity to “anatomy of theatre”, until I read about the beginnings of public dissection during the carnival in Bologna. From then on, the title was set.

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The Leatherman
4.9.–29.11.2026

With works by Leonore Mau, Reba Maybury, Herbert Tobias, Dean Sameshima and Wolfgang Tillmans

Curated by Kévin Blinderman, Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Charles Teyssou

In 1978, Karl Lagerfeld designed a leather costume for Peter Chatel’s theatrical adaptation of The Leatherman. The play itself would almost disappear. The costume did not. Chatel’s project had begun with Der Leatherman spricht mit Hubert Fichte, published in 1977 by the German writer and ethnographer Hubert Fichte and Hans Eppendorfer. Composed of three highly fictionalized interviews conducted over several years, the book occupies an unstable territory between confession, ethnography and self-invention. Born Hans-Peter Reichelt, Eppendorfer had already transformed himself repeatedly: murderer, prisoner, writer, leather dominator and chronicler of St. Pauli’s underworld. Even the notorious account of murdering an elderly woman because she resembled his mother was stylized through the interviews, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish testimony from literary construction. Long before Chatel brought him to the stage, Eppendorfer had already turned his own biography into a performance.

The Leatherman has never really stopped changing costumes. Premiered by Peter Chatel at the Théâtre du Lucernaire in Paris in 1979, the adaptation transformed Fichte and Eppendorfer’s interviews into a three-act monologue, performed principally by Michel Albertini, with Chatel appearing as both director and actor. Conceived less as a conventional play than as a theatrical dispositif, it condensed incompatible temporalities into a single space: archaic ritual and television aesthetics, leather mythology and the Wirtschaftswunder, the lingering shadows of Germany’s recent past and the invention of new homosexual identities. Hamburg gradually ceased to function as a setting and became the play’s central character. Rainer Werner Fassbinder reportedly considered staging the work himself, while the presence of Daniel Schmid’s camp and baroque cinema situates The Leatherman within a broader German-speaking constellation in which theatre, cinema, fashion and performance continually passed into one another.

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