Polish Theatre Kiel

Galia was born in 1949 in Wrocław/Breslau and graduated in 1971 from the State Academy for Film, Television and Theatre/Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Filmowa, Telewizyjna i Teatralna im. Leona Schillera in Łódź. From 1971 to 1976 and 1977 to 1982 he was a member of the  Edmund Wierciński Contemporary Theatre/Teatr Współczesny im. Edmunda Wiercińskiego in Wroclaw, directed a private theatre in Wroclaw City Hall and worked as a lecturer at the local drama school. In 1976/77 he performed in the Jan-Kochanowski Theatre/Teatr. Jana Kochanowskiego in Opole.[2] In addition he appeared in film and television productions.[3] When martial law was imposed in Poland in 1981 he refused to sign a long declaration of loyalty to the new state doctrine, and was suspended from teaching the following day. He then used an international theatre festival in Mannheim and Esslingen to escape to Germany. The only friend he knew here lived in Kiel. During a workshop at the Kieler Schauspielhaus, a group of Polish actors founded an initiative entitled 'Polish Theatre in Deutschland e.V.' and on 21stApril 1983, at the Kieler Ball Pompös (today's Max Nachttheater), they performed the farce "Indyk"/"The Turkey" by Sławomir Mrożek in Polish with seventeen actors. It was the hour of birth of the Polish Theatre Kiel. But after only three performances it was clear that the Polish-speaking audience in Kiel was too small to meet future demands. When the acting company broke up, Galia took over as director, a post he still holds today. Since then the theatre has been playing in German. According to Galia, for a long time he simply memorised the German texts without knowing what he was talking about. 

After three years of playing on various stages, the theatre found its permanent home on the ground floor of a 1920s apartment building at Düppelstraße 61a in the Düsternbrook district of Kiel, twelve minutes by bus from the main railway station. The audience has remained faithful to this classical one-room theatre. Indeed its enthusiasm has been such, that by the 36thyear of its existence it had staged eighty-seven productions and counted two thousand five hundred visitors per year. In 1991 Galia was awarded the Friedrich-Hebbel-Prize for being a "mediator between East and West". The prize is given by a foundation in Kiel, which honours artists living in Northern Germany whose achievements "go well beyond the average". In 1994 he was awarded the Culture Prize of the City of Kiel.

Over the years numerous directors, over seventy actors, fifteen stage designers and sixteen costume designers, innumerable musicians, technicians, photographers and assistant directors have worked at the theatre. The state of Schleswig-Holstein and the city of Kiel share the basic funding costs, around 60,000 Euros (2003). The box office income flows into the day-to-day running of the theatre, while the actors, technicians and numerous other helpers work without salary, on a voluntary basis. A number of activities could only be undertaken with the support of the local job centre and the Kiel employment and training company. Numerous productions could only be staged with a core company around Galia and the actresses Jutta Ziemke and Meike Neumann. Both have been with the theatre since its early days, helping to build it up and decisively shaping its programme and image. So far Ziemke has played in thirty-one productions. Neumann, who studied at the acting school in Kiel, was the first German actress to join the theatre in 1983 and has since been responsible for selecting the plays, the dramaturgy, make-up and costumes.[4] Since her serious illness, Kiel drama students have been standing in for her. Guest appearances have been made by the actor Astrit Geci from Kosovo, Linda Stach from Duisburg, Antje Schlaich, who completed her training at the Kiel Drama School in 2016, the Kiel actor Martin Friederichs, the freelance actress Christina Dobirr, Elena Schmidt-Arras from the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover, and Oleksandra Zapolska from Odessa. If an ensemble member drops out, the grants from the state and the city of Kiel are sometimes cut, which then plunges the theatre into even greater difficulties.