Director of Volksbuehne theatre to stay until 2017

Director Frank Castorf, known as the "bad boy" of German theatre, will stay on at Berlin's Volksbuehne until 2017, to mark 25 years at the prestigious avant-garde company, city officials said.
The 63-year-old iconoclast has had his contract at the politically engaged theatre in east Berlin, which had been due to expire in summer 2016, extended by one year, they said.
Talks are underway to find a successor, the cultural department of Berlin city authorities said.
Castorf was a prominent artist in communist East Germany before taking the reins of the Volksbuehne, or People's Stage theatre, in 1992, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
His stagings are often bold, controversial and lengthy, and under his near quarter century at the Volksbuehne, it has become one of Europe's leading theatres.
At the 2013 Bayreuth Festival devoted to the works of Richard Wagner, Castorf's production of the four-opera "Ring" cycle proved highly controversial, with booing and jeering from the audience after its premiere.
The staging set Wagner's story in faraway places such as Baku, Azerbaijan, and featured prostitutes, gangsters, Kalashnikov rifles and copulating crocodiles.
Source: AFP