Etienne Pluss

Étienne Pluss was born in Geneva and ran an art gallery before studying set design at Berlin’s University of the Arts. He began his career in the theatre as design assistant to Achim Freyer and Karl-Ernst Herrmann. Since 2000 he has worked as a freelance stage designer. His designs have been seen at four of Vienna’s leading theatres –the Burgtheater, the Akademietheater, the Theater in der Josefstadt and the Volkstheater – as well as the Berlin and Hanover State Operas, the Frankfurt Opera, the Bonn Theatre, the Paris Opéra, the Gothenburg Opera, the National Theatre in Prague, the Basel Theatre, the Opéra de Dijon, the spoken theatres in Leipzig, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and the Berliner Ensemble. Among the directors with whom he has worked are George Tabori, Katharina Thoma, Claus Guth, Philipp Himmelmann, Enrico Lübbe, Adriana Altaras, Patrick Schlösser, Philip Tiedemann and Nadja Loschky.

Étienne Pluss’s most recent work includes his sets for Beat Furrer’s Violetter Schnee at the Berlin State Opera, for which he won a Faust Theatre Award in 2019; Claus Guth’s production of La bohème at the Paris Opéra; Elektra for the Bonn Opera; Tristan und Isolde at the Leipzig Opera; Enrico Lübbe’s production of Winterreise at the Leipzig Schauspiel; Katharina Thoma’s productions of Martha and La serva padrona at the Frankfurt Opera; Damian Szifron’s production of Samson et Dalila in Berlin; and Nadja Loschky’s production of Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Passenger for the Graz Opera.

For his designs for Salome – a co-production between Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera in New York – he was nominated for the Russian Golden Mask Theatre Award in 2022. He also designed the sets for Richard Brunel’s production of Rigoletto at the Opéra national de Lorraine, for Immo Karaman’s production of Otello at the Hanover State Opera and for Evgeny Titov’s production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus.

In 2022 he designed the sets for The Makropulos Case in Berlin and for Claus Guth’s production of Georg Friedrich Haas’s Bluthaus at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, for Enrico Lübbe’s production of Das kalte Herz at the Leipzig Schauspiel and for the world premiere of Richard Brunel’s production of Thierry Escaich’s Shirine at the Opéra National de Lyon. Étienne Pluss regularly designs the stage for the Fashion Weeks in Milan and Berlin.

He was invited to the Berlin Theatre Festival in 1998 and the following year won the Kainz Medal for his work on Thomas Bernhard’s Claus Peymann kauft sich eine Hose und geht mit mir essen. In 2004 he was nominated for the Nestroy Prize for his sets for Sergi Belbel’s Die Zeit der Plancks at the Vienna Burgtheater.