Plastic has never seemed more “translucent”

Busts of all the big names associated with the Munich Kammerspiele, both past and present, stand side by side on the shelves of the theater’s makeup and hairstyling workshop: a veritable who’s who of German theater, molded and shaped with silicone rubber and plaster of paris. “We need the impressions of the heads of actors in order to make wigs a perfect fit,” says Brigitte Frank, head of the makeup and hairstyling department at the Kammerspiele. “Ultimately, the audience shouldn’t notice that an actor is wearing a wig.”

Silicone is ubiquitous in the Kammerspiele theater workshop at Otto-Falckenberg-Straße 2, which is also where the theater director’s and administrative offices are based. To the left of the door, numerous artificial scars made of silicone are attached to a sampler with colorful pins. And the workshop tables are strewn with body parts, such as arms, hands and legs. Some seem shockingly real, but tears, blood and corpses have always been the stuff of theater – dating back to the first Greek tragedies penned by Sophocles. “We use our makeup artistry to create the dramatic effect the stage director is aiming at,” says Frank, explaining her work.

The Munich Kammerspiele looms large in the German-speaking theater world. Bertold Brecht worked here from 1922, first as a dramatic advisor and later as a director. Elisabeth Bergner, Therese Giehse and Marianne Hoppe were German-language theater icons at different times between the 1920s and 1980s who celebrated spectacular successes in the Art Nouveau Kammerspiele building at Maximilianstraße 26. And when one of expressionist theater’s greats, director and actor Fritz Kortner, returned from exile in the USA to the bombed ruins of post-war Germany in 1947, he naturally made the Kammerspiele his artistic home. No German-speaking theater has received the Theater of the Year Award as often as this house – most recently in 2019. This year, the Munich troupe was again invited to perform two pieces at the Berlin Theater Festival, where the top ten performances from German-speaking countries were set to be presented. This event had to be canceled, however, due to coronavirus pandemic.

The stringent artistic demands made by the Kammerspiele match the standard the directors expect from the makeup and hairstyling department – and the demands the makeup artists place on their own work. “It’s not the material that counts, but the effect that it can achieve,” explains Frank. “Nowadays, we’re used to movie visuals and high standards of realism. And when realism is required on stage, silicone gives us an opportunity to create this realism.” She added that silicone extended the range available to makeup artists. “We can make our stage productions more cinematic visually,” says Frank, who began her training at the Kammerspiele in 1985. She founded a workshop for special effects (SFX) and wig production, which she then headed for 15 years before returning to her roots when Johan Simons became Kammerspiele theater director in 2009.

Frank first encountered silicone rubber in her workshop in the mid-2000s – a plastic that has been used extensively by makeup artists in the film industry for years but was relatively unknown in the theater: silicone rubber. Since then, she has immersed herself in the specific characteristics of this material, and the Munich Kammerspiele team now ranks among the experts in silicone.

“Full-body molds are quite a challenge – and that goes for the model too. We only do this with experienced artists who have command over their bodies,” she adds. The artist lies on a long table in the middle of the room surrounded by seven makeup artists until Tommy Opatz arrives with a bucket containing freshly mixed A- and B-component blue silicone rubber. With great concentration, he pours the silicone over the model’s body while his colleagues distribute the viscous compound evenly with brushes and trowels. “We only have a small time frame for the whole impression because the silicone cures so quickly and the model can’t cope with the ordeal the process involves for long,” says Opatz, a makeup artist who was in the film industry, including work on the Hobbit movies, before joining the Kammerspiele.

The first silicone layer cures after six or seven minutes. Two additional layers follow until the flexible rubber is thick enough to make a firm negative mold. “Not a single air bubble has formed,” he notes. Now the makeup artists apply a layer of plaster of paris bandages onto the silicone to support the polymer compound. Then the team removes the mold. The model turns over on the table to lie on her stomach and the whole process is repeated on the back of her body. The molding process is finished after 45 minutes and everyone breathes a sigh of relief, especially the model of whom the mold was made.

The next day, the team of six makeup artists meets up to pour a silicone rubber compound into the negative mold to create the copy of the body. “The worst-case scenario would be if the silicone bonded together,” says Opatz.

That is why the Kammerspiele team’s normal routine involves trying out different release agents in advance. “Not every release agent is suitable for every type of silicone,” explains Frank. The number of rubber layers should be tested beforehand, too – as should the time it takes the cured silicone rubber to aerate. “This is all about learning from experience. What we learned then has to be repeatedly put to the test for each individual application,” she adds.

The makeup artists use ELASTOSIL^® FX 20 to make the replica. It is a pourable silicone rubber compound that addition-cures at room temperature and is supplied as two components. “This silicone is very good for accurate body replicas – it is formulated as an optimal mix of stability and compressibility,” explains WACKER’s Hans-Rudolf Pfeffer, who heads Technical Support for moldmaking-grade silicone rubbers.