Berliner Volksbühne – Pollesch’s “Manzini Studies”: The crunch, the drama, the terror

Currently, as long as this is still possible, the disciples of the discourse theater messiah as well as those who at some point want to claim to have been there in the flesh are pursuing the last applied Pollesch sciences until the topic is brought to the attention of cultural historians and their own nostalgia leaves.

In many places you can no longer see productions by the author-director and Volksbühne director René Pollesch, who died at the beginning of the year. You won’t find them on the schedules of the Staatsschauspiel Stuttgart, the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg and the Burgtheater in Vienna.

The Deutsches Theater Berlin, which could urgently use any substantial work in the repertoire, has also taken the Pollesch evenings off its schedule and also sent “Love Simply Extraterrestrial” to the Schauspielhaus in Zurich to be taken over. From there, the 2018 production “I don’t know what a place is, I only know its price (Manzini studies)” was freely released to Berlin, where it has been being performed at the Volksbühne since last week.

This author’s play titles alone have cult status. The Pollesch theatrologists of the future will certainly be able to make sense of the puzzling names (some of which have no apparent connection to what is happening on stage) and categorize them. The ones with the overly long titles that go beyond the format of any announcement sheet (“When can I finally go to a supermarket and buy what I need based on my good looks alone?”), the ones with the pop culture references (“Look into my eyes, social delusion “) and those with the beneficial imperatives (“Throw away your ego!”).

Recently, Pollesch often revolved his productions around art and theater itself. He sometimes borrowed the title from the old Brecht: “Passing. It’s so easy, what’s hard to do”, “Mrs. Kathrin Angerer’s rifles”, “The rise and fall of a curtain and his life in between” and “Mr. Puntila and the giant thing in the middle”.

This series also includes “I don’t know what a place is, I only know its price,” which refers to Brecht’s educational play “The Measure” and to which the strange addition “Manzini Studies” is added. Probably an allusion to the Berlin-Charlottenburger Café Restaurant Manzini (a place with prices in the much higher segment).

The three Pollesch veterans Kathrin Angerer, Marie Rosa Tietjen and Martin Wuttke master the 100 minutes in a frenzy of thought. The glamorous costumes (Sabin Fleck) are certainly changed as often as the beards and wigs. Barbara Steiner got the Zurich stage design just right for the Volksbühne.

First, the three actors stand in front of a black and white striped curtain and talk emphatically about each other’s heads and collars before the cloth lifts and we see an oversized monkey hand – greetings from King Kong! – which rises and falls, picking up and dropping players. This is the playful factor that defines the Pollesch evenings, but which is somewhat neglected in this production, and which manages to tame the abundance of ideas.

The classical Freudian-style psychoanalytic session lasts 50 minutes, neither longer nor shorter. Pollesch has his players criticize this setting with Lacan: Why should the analysand practice repetitions time after time in circular thinking movements for 40 minutes, only to get through to the real thing ten minutes before the end? Shouldn’t it be possible to skip the 40 unnecessary minutes?

What the Lacanian tries in the psychoanalytic treatment, the actors go through for the theater, for life itself – and fail. With a five, six, maybe eight or even 24-hour “Midsummer Night’s Dream” – shouldn’t it be possible to get in shortly before the end? And can we not succeed, despite the lack of a test, in ending our own lives in the right way?

It’s no use, no one can escape the compulsion to repeat things here. And so everyone turns in circles in a stage-like manner, takes the words of the other person and makes them their own: “All life is a process of decline,” it sounds dozens of times in the audience. From “Midsummer Night’s Dream” you get to dream interpretation and from there straight back again. You want to get to the bottom of the crack, the drama, the terror, but in the end you only notice your own jump in the bowl.

Where things didn’t go any further with Freud, Pollesch and his players moved on to Donna Haraway and others. And where theory has taken its place on the stage as a big question mark, the theater makers are turning to their own topic: Who is playing (and representing) whom here? How do you depict reality? And how can we get out of the “Summer Night” dramaturgy?

After this evening, you leave the Volksbühne feeling a little melancholy. Not because life was once again presented as a process of failure. No, because this type of theater art, for which Pollesch stood and stands, is so saturated with the present. The discourses of the recent past are briefly revived. But what we saw on stage is already museum-worthy. A few more performances and it’s all over.

Next performances November 19th, 27th and 25.12.

www.volksbuehne.berlin

It’s no use, no one can escape the compulsion to repeat things here.

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