Theater der Altmark

The Theatre of the Altmark stands in Stendal, a town in the Altmark region of Saxony-Anhalt. It serves as a state theatre for northern Saxony-Anhalt, producing plays, children’s theatre, puppet shows and musicals. Around seventy staff work there, staging about twenty productions each season in over five hundred performances. More than sixty-five thousand people attend its shows every year. The theatre’s programmes focus on topics of social importance. Under Intendant Dorotty Szalma, the 2023–24 season took ‘Perspective Change’ as its guiding theme. Half of all performances take place outside the main house, touring across Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Thuringia, Lower Saxony, Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and Saxony. Each summer the company performs on the open-air stage at Arendsee. It also collaborates with the Mitteldeutsche Kammerphilharmonie for concerts and with the Nordharzer Städtebundtheater for musical productions. Inside the theatre in Stendal’s Karlstraße there are three auditoriums: the Large House with five hundred and fifty-six seats, the Small House with ninety-nine and the Rangfoyer with eighty-one. The theatre also runs a theatre-education centre, a café and the Kaisersaal for readings and recitals. In summer the company performs in the theatre yard, the former prison site and even on disused industrial land. The building itself preserves traces of its past in ‘history windows’ installed during later renovations.