Volksbühne director and regular guest in Zurich Pollesch dies
Published: Tuesday, Feb 27th 2024, 13:30
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He knew the Berlin Volksbühne better than almost anyone else when he took over the management of the theater: Now artistic director René Pollesch has died at the age of 61. Pollesch was a permanent guest at the Schauspielhaus Zürich with his productions, the last of which was in the 2018/2019 season.
His death on Monday was completely sudden and unexpected, the theater announced on Monday evening. Volksbühne spokeswoman Lena Fuchs did not initially provide any details about the exact circumstances of his death. "We are all shocked", she told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur. Pollesch was one of the great playwrights and directors of the German theater scene.
In his plays, there were often neither straightforward plots nor classical characters. Pollesch once told the weekly newspaper "Die Zeit" that this "oil trail of a coherent character, on which one then sleds in representational theater" bored most actors. "With us, nobody has to show a reasonably logical and coherent emotional performance for an hour and a half. You can hardly manage that even in life."
Light and complex
His theater texts simultaneously had a lightness and a complexity that were sometimes difficult to bridge together. When Pollesch then played another old song - Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" or "Drive" by The Cars, for example - the audience were sometimes still struggling to understand what they had just heard.
The playwright and director was born in Friedberg, Hesse, in 1962. He studied Applied Theater Studies at the University of Giessen, where his teachers included George Tabori and Heiner Müller. Pollesch has worked on many stages, experimenting with staging his own plays and even turning a drive-in cinema into a theater.
He has staged his own plays at the Burgtheater Vienna, the Deutsches Theater Berlin, the Schauspielhaus Zurich and the Münchner Kammerspiele, among others. He has written over 200 plays, mostly short works. He has staged a total of eight productions in Zurich.
He last premiered his theater study "Ich weiss nicht, was ein Ort ist, ich kenne nur seinen Preis" in December 2018. Previously, his seventh play for the Zurich Schauspielhaus was "High (du weisst wovon)" (2017), a colorful variety and circus show with an ensemble, choir, camera, microphone and lots of music.
Von banal bis gross
The themes that Pollesch tackled ranged from the supposedly banal to the supposedly grand. "High (du weisst wovon)" in Zurich, for example, was a concentrated text installation of a discursive nature. Everyday or philosophical theses, themes, stories about meanings and coincidences, about picnics, film sets, cinema visits, the lottery, thinking and speaking through to depression are discussed in leaps and bounds, repeated, spun on and taken ad absurdum.
Or in "(Life on earth can be sweet) Donna" at the Deutsches Theater, where he made the characters think about the revolving stage and epic theater, about shopping malls and friendships, about car accidents and capitalism. Or the legendary evening he put on with actor Fabian Hinrichs at the Friedrichstadt-Palast in Berlin. The play was called "Believing in the possibility of the complete renewal of the world". It was one of those evenings that not only the German feuilleton watched.
Pollesch has received several awards for his work. He received the Mülheim Drama Prize in 2001 and 2006, among others. Most recently, he was awarded the Arthur Schnitzler Prize in Vienna in 2019.
Pollesch at the Volksbühne
The fact that Pollesch became director of the Volksbühne was good news from the point of view of many long-time supporters of the theater. After a quarter of a century of Frank Castorf, there was much protest against the Belgian Chris Dercon as his successor, who soon resigned his post. After an interim solution with Klaus Dörr, Pollesch then took over. With the son of a janitor, a man of action moved into Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz who had known the theater for a long time: Pollesch had been at the Volksbühne under Castorf many years earlier. The theater is considered an idiosyncratic house with strong characters.
Pollesch has worked with actors such as Martin Wuttke, Fabian Hinrichs, Kathi Angerer and Sophie Rois. He opened his first season as director of the theater in September 2021 with the world premiere of "Aufstieg und Fall eines Vorhangs und sein Leben dazwischen".
When he announced his new post back in 2019, he sat on stage in his usual attire: jeans, jacket, glasses. He took out a piece of paper and explained how he envisioned his directorship. You don't have to worry, said Pollesch, he is never alone. He is also never alone as a director and author.
His paper also stated what could be continued at the Volksbühne, namely "continuing not to do everything right": "To make it very clear that you will not manage a theater, that you will not celebrate theater openings like everywhere else, except for the staff, that you will not publish season booklets, that you will not behave properly and that you will not do everything that is expected."
©Keystone/SDA
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