26 October 2022

O. E. Hasse Prize 2022 awarded to Jakob Gühring

The O. E. Hasse Foundation is awarding the O. E. Hasse Prize 2022 to Jakob Gühring, a third-year student at Berlin’s “Ernst Busch” Hochschule für Schauspielkunst (Academy for Dramatic Art). The prize has a value of 5,000 euros and is awarded annually (on an alternating basis) to students of the Ernst Busch Academy and the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich in order to support and encourage outstanding talent. The prize is being presented on 2 November 2022 at the Ernst Busch Academy.

Born in Stuttgart in 1998, Gühring attended the Freie Waldorfschule Engelberg. In addition to his Steiner education, he received a varied musical training, singing in the boys’ choir and learning to play the piano, guitar and accordion. Having finished his schooling in 2017, he worked at the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, appearing in walk-on parts, and played minor roles in film and television productions before embarking on his studies at the Ernst Busch Academy in September 2019.

As Klaus Völker put in the jury statement, “Jakob Gühring is a soulful actor who has mastered his craft to perfection. He showed considerable resilience in dealing with the Covid lockdown period and his determination to work was unflagging. He was exceptional as Jean in a study of scenes from Strindberg’s Miss Julie, while in Kroetz’s Nicht Fisch, nicht Fleisch, his characterisation of the typesetter Edgar, whose life has been thrown off course, was enthralling in its mix of fortitude and introversion. He played Shakespeare's Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a sulky charm, and in Hamlet his rendition of Claudius – who wishes to pray but cannot repent and must first take off his roller skates before he can bend his stiff knees – he managed a powerful moment of inner pause in the king’s hitherto smooth path through the events of the world. The complexity and power that Gühring brought to the role of the barber Wilhelm Dietrich Wotan in Ernst Toller’s 1923 farce Der entfesselte Wotan resulted in a bravura performance that was entirely convincing. Amidst a riot of imagination and unbounded absurdity, which infected all the actors as a mutual source of inspiration, he still managed to credibly develop the satirical figure of the German nationalist subject, translating ideas from Chaplin in The Great Dictator or Martin Wuttke as Arturo Ui into his acting without stooping to mimicry.

The O. E. Hasse Foundation, which is maintained by the Akademie der Künste, has awarded the O. E. Hasse Prize since 1981. The Academy thereby fulfils the legacy of the stage and film actor Otto Eduard Hasse (1903–1978), who had provided a sum of money to promote young actors. The selection committee for the award comprises members of the Foundation’s Board. The board includes Chairman Klaus Missbach (Vienna/Nuremberg) as well as André Jung (Munich), Klaus Völker (Berlin) and Jossi Wieler (Berlin), who are also members of the Performing Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste.

The most recent recipients of the O. E. Hasse Prize were Rasmus Friedrich (2021, Munich), Emma Lotta Wegner and Alexander Wertmann (2020, Berlin), Julia Windischbauer (2019, Munich), Noah Saavedra (2018, Berlin) and William Bartley Cooper (2017, Munich).

Dates
O. E. Hasse Prize 2022 awarded to Jakob Gühring
Preliminaries and award ceremony
With an encomium by Klaus Völker
Wednesday, 2 November 2022, 7 pm
Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch, HfS Bühne OBEN
Zinnowitzer Str. 11, 10115 Berlin
Please register in advance: presse@hfs-berlin.de