2024-02-27 02:35:29
It was only two weeks ago that René Pollesch stood on stage to thunderous applause, as usual in jeans, a leather jacket and a peaked cap. It was the premiere of “nothing is ok”, the latest joint work by Pollesch and Fabian Hinrichs. Once again, the two exceptional artists turned everyday observations – from life in a shared apartment with an AI fridge to conversations among friends about doctor visits and blood poisoning – into a profound diagnosis of the present: a funny, a melancholic, a clever, simply an outstanding evening.
But unfortunately it is his last play: René Pollesch died unexpectedly on February 26th at the age of 61. It is also a big shock for his theater – the Volksbühne at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin. In 2021, the author and director took over the management of the house, which has seen great directors such as Benno Besson and Frank Castorf. After the disaster with Chris Dercon, Pollesch was supposed to bring new shine again; he brought back old veterans of the Volksbühne such as Martin Wuttke, Sophie Rois and Kathrin Angerer. Pollesch had known the house for many years and it was inextricably linked to his work.
also read
20 years before he took over as director of the Volksbühne, Pollesch became the artistic director of the legendary secondary venue Prater in Prenzlauer Berg under Castorf, where Christoph Schlingensief and later Vegard Vinge also worked with their extreme performances. At Pollesch’s side was the set designer Bert Neumann, who had new ideas for the theater space, for example as a residential stage. The “Prater Trilogy” was invited to the Theatertreffen in 2002, and Pollesch received the Mülheim Drama Prize. That was his breakthrough; from then on no one could get past him.
It is hard to underestimate Pollesch’s influence on German-speaking theater in the 21st century: in virtuosic text loops, he brought the intellectual life of modern people to the stage, as a mix of everyday life, theory, film and much more. Thinking, talking and smoking, that’s all he often needed – and yet he opened up new worlds with it. From Godard to Richard Sennett and Robert Pfaller to Twitter, Pollesch showed all of this as a natural interior of the present, while elsewhere dusty classics with sword fights were still being performed.
A child of Marx and Coca Cola
By studying applied theater studies in Giessen, Pollesch, who was born in Friedberg, Hesse in 1962, breathed in the spirit of post-dramatic theater; he learned from the great and pioneering thinkers Andrzej Wirth and Hans-Thies Lehmann, who were saturated with experience and theory. What Pollesch meant by postdramatic, he once described as “a Brecht drama without Brecht”: a socially alert and critical theater for the postmodern era. Making social processes visible and triggering thought processes, with a lot of irony.
Pollesch was a child of Marx and Coca-Cola. The titles of his evenings alone bear witness to the witty clash between popular culture and critical theory: “Love is colder than capital,” “Solidarity is suicide,” “The world is a guest of rich parents,” “Disgrace your neoliberal biographies!”, “I look yourself in the eyes, social delusion!”, “Throw away your ego!” or “You messed up my frying pan, you fried egg of terror”. Pollesch saw such title jokes as an assignment; the punch line was his faithful companion. And you could take some with you from every evening.
also read
In his early work, Pollesch explored the precarious working worlds with “Heidi Hoh”, which he knew only too well from his own experience from his time between his studies and his first work at the Volksbühne. The steel bath of self-realization was a recurring theme in his plays. “Kill Your Darlings!” is unforgettable! Streets of Berladelphia”, in which Hinrichs, as embodied longing, dances and tumbles through the stage in a car like in Mother Courage, finally in an octopus costume between a choir of athletes. It is an evening that achieves unimagined beauty precisely in its rejection of any indulgent beauty.
Pollesch always lived from his “working practice”, as he called it: from his stage sets like Bert Neumann and Anna Viebrock – and from his actors like Fabian Hinrichs, Sophie Rois, Martin Wuttke, Lilith Stangenberg, Kathrin Angerer, Franz Beil, Milan Peschel and many others. With “belief in the possibility of the complete renewal of the world,” the self-described “absolute anti-romantic” Pollesch and Hinrichs even conquered Berlin’s Friedrichstadtpalast, without fear of enlightened kitsch. More tabloid theater for intellectuals was hardly possible.
Not always happy as an artistic director, but outstanding as an artist
The fantastic evenings with Sophie Rois, such as “Cry Baby” and “Love, simply extraterrestrial”, which were staged at the Deutsches Theater Berlin because Pollesch was fleeing Dercon, are also unforgettable. The miscast short-term director had offered him a collaboration, but Pollesch preferred to seek contact with the political circles outside the theater, which later spectacularly occupied the Volksbühne. Despite later signs of alienation, an oppositional scene was closer to him than the great art world; that was the Volksbühne spirit.
As director, Pollesch wasn’t always happy at the house where he grew up; it was probably not his perfect role. But as an artist he always managed to achieve outstanding performances such as “Are you okay?” and most recently “Nothing is OK”, both of which are still on the Volksbühne program. The theater after Pollesch is different from the one before him; he shaped a new style of dealing with the present on stage, which has become known everywhere from Hamburg to Stuttgart to Zurich through numerous works. The loss is huge. The fact that René Pollesch is no longer alive is really not okay.
Here you will find content from third parties
In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.
#René #Pollesch #child #Marx #CocaCola