Vaganten Bühne

The Vaganten Bühne is a small private theatre in Berlin’s City West, tucked between the Zoologischer Garten station and the Kurfürstendamm in Kant Street. It shares a building with the Quasimodo jazz club, the Qmodo restaurant and the Delphi cinema. The theatre itself has a hundred seats and a studio-like feel, with a six-metre-wide stage and an intimate auditorium. The house has been a centre for adventurous drama since 1949, when Günther Rutenborn and Horst Behrend founded it as a touring company called Die Vaganten. In the 1960s it became known as Berlin’s avant-garde stage, staging Sartre, Genet, Ionesco and Mrożek. Today the programme balances contemporary plays, modern classics and new writing, with regular ties to local drama schools. Visitors find a compact space where audience and actors share the same room. The stage faces a single block of seating for eighty-three, creating an unusually close experience. Outside, the street mixes high-street shops, cafés and the daily queue for food aid at the station, setting the theatre’s lively, mixed neighbourhood.