René Pollesch (1962-2024): the Great Post-dramatic Auteur Director
Thomas Irmer*
Abstract
Known for his innovative ideas, René Pollesch redefined political theatre with his unique style, integrating social and self-criticism. His work, influenced by Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller, emphasized ensemble collaboration and often addressed contemporary societal issues.. Hs legacy includes around 200 works across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and beyond, leaving a lasting impact on world theatre.
Keywords: German theatre, innovation, political theatre
René Pollesch, one of the most influential artists in German-language theatre and artistic director of Berlin’s Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, has died Feb. 26, 2024.
As a writer-director who wrote a new play for each of his productions, Pollesch has been rethinking theatre since the end of the 1990s, allowing his actors to perform in a unique way. Following in the footsteps of Bertolt Brecht and Heiner Müller, he crafted a political theatre focused on current discourse that brought social criticism as well as theatre’s self-criticism to the stage. His oeuvre was marked by verve, humour and commitment, fostering an ensemble culture in which the players were invited to co-authorship. Pollesch’s career spanned approximately 200 works at various theatres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, internationally in Poland and numerous festivals.
Born in Friedberg, Hesse, in 1962, Pollesch was raised in an environment where artistic and intellectual pursuits were not prominent. As he once remarked, he was given a typewriter by a relative as a teenager and then began to write. He later studied in nearby Giessen at the newly founded Institute for Applied Theatre Studies under Andrzej Wirth, who advocated post-Brechtian theatre in theory and practice, inviting Heiner Müller, Robert Wilson and the lesser-known US avant-gardist John Jesurun to the institute’s rehearsal stage.
After an incubation period in the 1990s with commissions as a dramaturge at some minor theatres and growing writing experience, Pollesch was invited to Frank Castorf’s Volksbühne, where he independently directed the Praterspielstätte from 2000, presenting his now thematically focused series of plays. With the Heidi-Hoh trilogy, which began in Berlin’s Podewil as a venue for the off-scene, came the breakthrough into the world of national attention and the renowned Berlin Theatertreffen More importantly, this period connected him with an audience seeking theatre as a subversive-critical discourse in the canyons of capitalist culture.
Reflecting on René Pollesch’s beginnings as a theatre-maker prompts important questions. Where did he come from? Under what circumstances did he achieve his breakthrough? These are all very important questions, which are also linked to his last works up to ja nichts ist ok at Volksbühne.
As a first-year student at the Giessen Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in 1983, Pollesch learned about theatre from the founding director Andrzej Wirth and the later influential theatre scholar Hans-Thies Lehmann, who, rather than studying theatre history as traditional content, they focused almost exclusively on 20th-century avant-garde movements. A graduate of the institute later remarked mockingly that the Polish-American Professor Wirth’s view of theatre history covered roughly the period of early Jerzy Grotowski and Tadeusz Kantor and extended to Robert Wilson, i.e. covering only a few decades after the war. This unique approach most likely inspired Pollesch to do things differently in the theatre, or at least to try them out.
It was the specialty of the Giessen Institute, which conservative critic Gerhard Stadelmaier later described as the “biggest hotbed of misfortune in German theatre,” to bring theory and practice together, as unencumbered as possible by traditional guidelines and under the protective roof of a university stage with a limited audience reach.
However, like many other humanities or theatre school graduates in the 1990s, Pollesch faced years of perseverance with odd jobs, including adaptations, translations here and there, and periods of humiliating unemployment. In those times he wrote not adhering to established drama models, but drawing inspiration from films as a reference system or borrowing from the trash culture of the era. A play from 1992 aptly titled Splatterboulevard, exemplifies his approach. Towards the end of this incubation period, he invented a character called Heidi Hoh, through whom he critiqued the new working conditions of neoliberal capitalism, bitterly familiar to himself.
The breakthrough in theatre came with the three Heidi Hoh plays performed from 1998 onwards. It was a time when German theatres began to look for new authors and themes. In West Germany, the theatre landscape had remained relatively unchanged since the 1970s, while audiences in the East often felt lost. But suddenly everyone wanted to play something new, and the Schaubühne, under Thomas Ostermeier’s leadership, wanted to play young drama as an “umbilical cord to reality,” as Ostermeier called the task at the time.
Heidi Hoh’s emergence in the theatre world took place gradually. In 1998, she stepped onto the small stage of Berlin’s Podewil, an already well-established venue for alternative theater. Three women spoke in turbo staccato, structured by screams with “Scheiße!!!,” but otherwise alternating “uninterrupted on connection,” as it was called at the time, so that one had the impression that they were speaking to each other, but not as a dialogue. Pollesch thus brought the social content into a theatrical form with a “tripled woman,” for whom all boundaries between work, leisure, home and office dissolve in the self-alienation of her subject – around twenty years before the home office epidemic, but at the time clearly as a description of the conditions of precarious working environments. This resonated particularly with audiences under 40, who appreciated the pop-like, rather than traditionally political, nature of the theatre. Pollesch was able to move into the Prater, the Volksbühne’s small venue in Kastanienallee, with the third part of the Heidi Hoh series. There, in co-direction with dramaturge Aenne Quinones, he took over his own stage for the first time and was able to continue working his series.
In a standardised stage design by Castorf’s partner Bert Neumann, an entire season was dedicated to the theme of housing and who owns and rules the city. The titles Stadt als Beute (City as Prey) and Insourcing des Zuhause (Insourcing of Home) sound as if they were written for our immediate present today, but no, that was over twenty years ago and, as was later standard on the programme notes of Pollesch productions, these works referred to non-fiction and theory books of contemporary philosophy and sociology. This was an inspiring connection and was to become an original model in a very short time: the Pollesch theatre as we know it and will remember it.
The Volksbühne became his artistic home, while he in turn shaped the Volksbühne with his work. He worked there with all the great actors and actresses, including Sophie Rois, Martin Wuttke, Kathrin Angerer, Milan Peschel and, of course, Fabian Hinrichs, with whom he found his own language and gestural form and who once again wrote theatre history as the protagonist of their last work together, Ja nichts ist okay, which premiered just two weeks before the terrible news of his untimely death on 26 February.
Pollesch’s death leaves a significant void in the theatre world. His contributions will be remembered for a long time, ensuring his legacy endures.
*Thomas Irmer is editor-in-chief of the monthly Theater der Zeit in Berlin. He has published books on Luk Perceval, Frank Castorf, and most recently, Arbeit. Brecht. Cinema. Conversations with René Pollesch (Verlag Theater der Zeit).
Copyright © 2024 Thomas Irmer
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques e-ISSN:2409-7411
This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
