Hardly anyone in the theater has unmasked reality, the phrase, as stubbornly as René Pollesch. His stage productions were a celebration of full life.
René Pollesch developed his own form of theater. Recording from 2020.
Daniel Karmann / DPA / Keystone
It is a sad point that his last piece, which just premiered at the Berlin Volksbühne, is called “nothing is ok”. Because nothing about it can be okay. It may be that the author, artistic director and director René Pollesch died on Monday at the age of just 61. The title now sounds like the last greeting of a brilliant theater maker, a melancholic legacy.
Yet in the over two hundred plays that Pollesch wrote and staged himself, death always shone through its cunning absence. It was the fullness of life that was celebrated here. And it had to go on and on, from piece to piece, so that one could rub against it, expose it. To talk away the finiteness with desperate wit, whatever the vocabulary offered.
Greatest desire for confusion and getting lost
Hardly anyone in the theater has unmasked reality, the phrase, as stubbornly and inevitably as René Pollesch. He knew the red line between philosophy and slapstick and always crossed it with the greatest pleasure in confusion and confusion. Pollesch evenings were a preparatory school for contemporary analysis, which acted like regulars’ get-togethers.
The actors sat at the edge of the stage, chain-smoked and talked about their knowledge of the uninhabitability of the world; Massive backdrops landed around the stage, making the players look small and helpless as they struggled with the pitfalls of the objects and obsessions. Pollesch mercilessly gave them the keywords in terms of criticism of capitalism, gender madness or post-structuralism and yet got to the point with the ease of a falling mallet: “Very few people are suitable for the 21st century.”
René Pollesch was born in 1962 in Friedberg, Hesse, as the son of a caretaker and machine fitter. This origin from below was important for the man and the content of his work: he didn’t have to flirt with proletarian down-to-earthness, he knew it. And then studied anyway; His teachers were Heiner Müller and George Tabori, and he created his unmistakable style apart from the great masters. Since then he has worked at all major German-speaking houses. He finally found his home in the old Volksbühne under Frank Castorf.
He inherited Castorf after an unpleasant succession hiccup in 2021. It was convinced that with Pollesch he would be able to connect with legendary revolutionary times in the giant tanker at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. However, the new director was a bit unlucky in the leadership role, which didn’t really suit him, the solitary desk and stage worker.
Of course, you only saw a traditional Volksbühne signature when René Pollesch brought his own pieces to the stage again. Otherwise, the theater below him was floating in rather shallow waters, apart from a few enormous hits, which, however, satisfied more of the desire for entertainment and events.
Confused to the point of kneeling
René Pollesch alone provided the tough discourse with comical soul analysis, who reliably stormed the normal madness with admirable regularity and with the best actors. It was adorably caustic and cheerful and mind-bogglingly convoluted in its mental heaviness, and at times also redundant because it got stuck in the repetition loop. The new Pollesch was sometimes just the old one with rearranged fragments of sentences and a rumbling brain storm.
And despite that, or perhaps because of that, you laughed and were just a little ashamed that you had fallen for his theatrical tricks again. René Pollesch died far too early, a complete unfinished man. The theater will miss him.