Ruth Brinkmann

Ruth Brinkman (1937–1997) was the founder of Vienna's English Theatre.

Ruth Brinkmann was brought up in the Long Island suburbs of New York City. She studied acting at the Yale University Graduate School of Drama, directly from which she made her New York debut as Louise in G. B. Shaw’s In Good King Charles’s Golden Days, and continued her professional career in repertory at the Williamstown Playhouse in Massachusetts, the Cleveland Playhouse in Ohio, as well as the Court Theatre in Beloit, Wisconsin; Manhattan’s Town Hall, and the Chautauqua Arts Festival.

Subsequent to these appearances, Brinkmann was, together with Alan Alda, chosen from more than one thousand actors who auditioned for the Ford Foundation’s experimental theatre program at the Cleveland Playhouse in Ohio. Her Ford award was for three years, but, on her first summer vacation from Cleveland in 1959, she came to Vienna as a tourist. She met and later married the Austrian director, Franz Schafranek, and settled here in 1960.

As she spoke no German at the time, her husband had the idea of starting an English-language Theatre that would enable her to continue her work. The young couple opened their theatre in 1963 in a rented 99-seat auditorium in a downtown palace with a production of Jerome Kilty’s Dear Liar, starring Brinkmann and Anthony Steel, directed by Franz Schafranek.

For the first ten years before Vienna’s English Theatre acquired its permanent home, she played the female lead in every production except two. Among them were multiple roles in The World of Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, as well as the four ladies in Thornton Wilder’s Queens of France. She also played the Lady in Shaw’s Man of Destiny, Doris in The Owl and the Pussycat, Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and Amanda in the The Glass Menagerie, which subsequently toured throughout Israel.

At the Josefsgasse opening, Brinkmann starred in Terence Rattigan’s In Praise of Love, and when Spoon River was revived - with Ruth Brinkmann playing 22 different roles - the American Journalist Nino Lo Bello wrote in the Los Angeles Times that “she has just wrapped up another of her ‘tours de force’ successes”. Her multiple roles and quick changes in this production also won her a niche in Ripley’s Believe It or Not gallery.

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