Theater: René Pollesch: And life in between

Think elatedly

“The Rifles of Ms. Kathrin Angerer,” Wiener Festwochen/Volksbühne, premiere June 5, 2021

So what is that? A play or a dance film? Music from “La La Land” is playing, people are dancing, so it must be a dance film. Or are we in a film studio in Hollywood in 1938? Just as the viewer in “The Rifles of Frau Kathrin Angerer” is no longer able to find a solid plot base after just a few minutes, the same goes for Martin Wuttke, who slides across the stage or ends up in a spinning room. This is a room that rotates so that it appears to the camera as if you are walking across the walls or ceiling.

“I imagined something different when it came to turning,” complains Wuttke. And you yourself may have imagined something completely different when you heard “The Guns of Mrs. Kathrin Angerer,” even though the title heroine still appears – without guns, however. But that doesn’t matter at all on this evening by René Pollesch, which is one of his most enigmatic but also most exhilarating. People dance, a crane camera swings around, it looks like a dance movie and then it doesn’t; That doesn’t matter at all either. It’s obvious that the people on stage are having a lot of fun and you’re having a lot of fun as an audience member too. It’s a terrible suspicion that you may not be able to put your finger on exactly what makes you happy.Jakob Hayner

detention

“Love, simply extraterrestrial”, Deutsches Theater Berlin, premiere July 1, 2022

Is this piece really by René Pollesch? Does it come from a search question on ChatGPT? Has anyone actually written anything here? In the end, was it a brilliant move by the high-speed director who wanted to prove that his texts wouldn’t work at the staid Deutsches Theater Berlin with its Heinrich Böll Foundation audience across the street and that it would be better to go straight to the Volksbühne? Starting next season, the production will land at the Schauspielhaus Zurich, where it will perhaps find an audience.

These are questions that accompany you throughout the very tedious 90 minutes. Sure, it’s about sex, aliens, a radar researcher and capitalism, and thematically it definitely fits the late director. The fact that there are Ramones in between, crashing and clanging, is of course completely Pollesch. And yes: Sophie Rois speaks the text as if she were the director symbiote (or was Pollesch the symbiote and she the landlady?).

But all that banal nonsense! The high school jokes about sex that get predictable laughter from the post-high school audience! The pieces of cake that you smear on each other’s faces! This is all so sad, so devastating. Admittedly not as sad as the death of the great Pollesch.Raul Zelik

We clairaudients

“Are you okay?”, Volksbühne, premiere March 24, 2022

René Pollesch shows the abyss in the middle of everyday life. The path back to normality after the corona pandemic apparently remains blocked. That’s what this one-person piece is about – almost a pamphlet! – with the great Fabian Hinrichs. Although it was loudly announced that all doors were now open again. But he stays “inside the door.”

I can still hear the dark words: “We will be ghosts.” He has just torn out almost all the walls in his apartment to enlarge the dining room. If guests come again. A ritual act of liberation, at least half of it. Because he hasn’t set foot in his kitchen for a long time. This is how the longing for community collapses with the practiced isolation. After the end of the state of emergency, will normality return? No, the state of emergency has apparently taken root within us.

Pollesch: a highly sensitive seismograph of the everyday faults he precisely named, which are always extensions of the faults in the fabric of the world. There are regressions and destruction everywhere – but perhaps also an increase in inner resonance space. We mentally damaged people have become more alert.Gunnar Decker

Without break

“And now?”, Volksbühne, premiere December 2, 2022

It would be nice if “lightning would finally react to grievances in a flash.” Inflation? Lightning strikes. A war of aggression? Lightning strikes. Right-wing extremism? Lightning strikes. Problem solved. Quite simply, like “in agitprop theater.” It’s just a shame that the lightning that strikes in “And now?” tears apart the grievances – or people – when they strike. And exactly as it happens when you think.

Because nothing is easy, especially life. Especially if you do it from the perspective of solidarity, which for the three players that evening, Martin Wuttke, Milan Peschel and Franz Beil, means: talking without a break – with each other. The clerk with the actor, the actor with the work manager, the work manager with the night watchman, in the Petrochemical Combine in Schwedt as well as at the Volksbühne. An eternal discussion of world situations, without instructions. Rather, it is about “striving for the greatest possible paradox in our thinking.”

This is the Pollesch philosophy that the author and director leaves us after the pandemic years, the war in Ukraine and a European election that tipped into right-wing extremism. “And now?” Of course! “It has to go on.” The final stage direction is: “The players go to the back and continue talking.”There Lena Eilers

Really sad

“yes nothing is ok”, Volksbühne, premiere February 11, 2024

“Siri, play me the song of death,” Fabian Hinrichs instructs the pseudo-intelligent technology in the shared apartment, where actually speaking to each other has long been given up. “I’m dying – in unimaginable torment,” he says that evening with the all-encompassing and clear title “nothing’s okay,” and also the sentence: “I’m sad as shit.” Sad as shit, yes. With these words, with the oppressive image at the end, for which Hinrichs lets himself be buried under the bodies of the choristers, you can’t help but think of René Pollesch’s death, but also realize what this production is: the final point of one Life’s work, also the highlight of a congenial collaboration between the author-director Pollesch and the author-actor Hinrichs.

What goes on so tenderly and cleverly across the stage decorated by Anna Viebrock (for which she simply recycled her furnishings from Salzburg’s “Falstaff”) is no longer just sad as shit, but rather accurate as shit. In the face of war and even more war, society behaves like an old shared apartment where no one has anything to say to each other anymore. There are still reservations about the cleaning schedule and threats of expulsion. You can no longer talk about the actual questions, you can only despair. The rest – silence.Erik Zielke