Urs Odermatt

In 1992 during research for his feature film Constable Zumbühl [de], he discovered his father’s photo archive and grouped the works together into the collections entitled Meine Welt, Karambolage, Im Dienst and In zivil.

Critics praised the "careful choreography of the images make a pleasant change from the usual loquaciousness of the films d’auteur in the German language" (Frankfurter Rundschau, 11 March 1989).

Constable Zumbühl [de] was unsettling in its claustrophobic depiction of the closed society of a small village, where everybody knows everybody else and all of their business, "the world in a water droplet" (Krzysztof Kieślowski).

"...as (...) an example of the broad spectrum of directing styles in plays staged at the Saarländischen Staatstheater, by far the most unsettling are those that defy expectations of spoken drama and are reputed to be those present in the work of film and theatre director Urs Odermatt.

Sentences collapse time and time again like a house of cards, and new façades are created from the rubble.. With Odermatt, everything turns into a quote within a quote, which explains why choruses of Schlager songs are sung, phrases are scratched like vinyl records and scenes (like those created specially by Gulden) function as a play-within-a-play.. As a result, speech develops that is by turns choral and concerted, where the voices in the dialogue cross each other and cut each other off.

For a long time, this tried and tested deconstructivist ritual captivated audiences just as it had done three years ago at the Saarbrücken premiere of Rolf Kemnitzer’s Die Bauchgeburt, and reveals the dialogue-like qualities of Gulden's play."

"Odermatt has looked around, and as an author has created a hybrid of Kroetzen’s village tragedies with Ravenhill’s beat-up Brit furore, then throws in Castorf’s- savagery and splatter movie – an overloaded but polemical attempt.

Rather than descending into banal denunciation, in a host of excellently choreographed scenes, he conjures up deeply affecting dreamlike and nightmarish images onto the stage.

Ja, ich dich auch – Urs Odermatt inszeniert seinen Theatererstling als Furioso über Sexualität und Macht, Reutlinger Nachrichten, 29.

"An absurd ballet rushes across the stage, cascades of words are layered over each other and fuse together with each other, often barely comprehensible, then into a forceful, insistent crescendo of staccatto: I am, I was, everything goes by so quickly!'

Urs Odermatt’s staging is merciless in its immediacy, even more , even more open in its pacy choreography, which demands a huge presence from the ensemble cast dressed in rustling paper with printed pages from tabloid newspapers.

The premiere of Partick Marber’s Closer under the direction of Urs Odermatt lives up to its title and after the interval separated the theatregoers into those of a more delicate sensibility from those with a more open mind.