René Pollesch, Provocative force in the German theater, dies at the age of 61

René Pollesch, a prolific playwright and director whose work – intellectually serious yet irreverent, talkative, wacky and full of pop culture references – made him one of the most important forces in German theater of the past thirty years, died in Berlin on Monday . He was 61.

His death was announced by the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz theater, where he has been artistic director since 2021. No reason was given.

Mr. Pollesch (pronounced POL-esh) wrote about 200 plays and directed a large majority of them himself, often in leading theaters in the German-speaking world. But while his plays lit up stages in places like Stuttgart, Hamburg, Vienna and Zurich, he was most closely associated with the Volksbühne, a government-funded theater in what was once East Berlin that had a reputation for daring and provocative theater. .

Mr. Pollesch took over the theater’s leadership after years of management turmoil caused by the resignation of the company’s longtime artistic director, Frank Castorf, in 2017. When Mr. Pollesch arrived, there were two others at the top post came and gone, and the theater longed for stability.

In the two and a half seasons he was at the helm, he staged nine original plays, eight of which are still in the theater repertoire. The most recent, “ja nichts ist oke” (“yes, nothing is okay”) premiered on February 11.

He had previously run the theater’s smaller, off-site venue, the Prater, and directed dozens of productions both there and in the main building.

Mr. Pollesch’s plays, which typically ran less than 90 minutes, often made serious social and political points with sitcom-like levity and Dada-like disregard for conventional logic. His unique brand of theater, variously described as postmodern and postdramatic, was short on character and plot but big on verbal high jinks and idiosyncratic performances, all developed with his favorite actors, including Sophie Rois, Fabian Hinrichs and Martin Wuttke, who were essentially his co-creators.

Many of his productions achieved cult status in Berlin and elsewhere, but the intensive way in which he devised his plays with his trusted actors made it difficult for other directors to stage his work, which remained largely defined by their original casts and productions. Although his works have been seen throughout Europe and even in Tokyo and Brazil, none of his works have yet been performed in the United States.

In a 2006 essay in the journal Contemporary Theater Review, the scholar David Barnett suggested that Mr. Pollesch, also called discurstheater (“discourse theatre”), was not easily translated into an Anglo-American context. Its “enduring popularity may be difficult for the English-speaking reader to understand, as many of the plays lack both character and plot,” wrote Dr. Barnett, a professor of theater at York University.

That’s what critic Peter Laudenbach wrote in an assessment in the newspaper on Tuesday The Munich-based newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung that Mr. Pollesch had “developed his own form of theater,” calling it “extremely entertaining while at the same time on par with cutting-edge sociological debates.”

“The acting was virtuoso, stunningly relaxed, almost always surprising and never boring,” he added“not least because more interesting ideas flashed through Pollesch’s pieces per minute than anywhere else during the entire season: criticism of capitalism with fun and refined entertainment such as in the better kind of boulevard theater, preferably with music from the Beach Boys of Sinatra’s ‘I Fly to the Moon. ”

René Pollesch was born on October 29, 1962 in Friedberg, a town near Frankfurt, in what was then West Germany. His father, Romuald, was a school custodian; his mother, Emmi, ran the household. Mr. Pollesch is survived by his father and an older sister.

In the 1980s he studied applied theater studies at the University of Giessen, close to his birthplace, and wrote weekly plays that he performed together with his classmates.

After graduating, he briefly led his own theater company in Frankenthal, a city in southwestern Germany, before working as a playwright and producer at Theater am Turn in Frankfurt. In 1996 he won a scholarship to work and study at the Royal Court Theater in London, where he took part in seminars led by playwrights Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill.

A turning point in his career came in 2001, when, at the age of 39, he won the Mulheim Playwright’s Prize, one of Germany’s most important theatrical awards, for ‘world wide web slums’, a seven-part ‘theatre soap opera’ that premiered in the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. The Mulheim jury cited the play’s “desperate comedy.” In 2006 he won the prize for the second time. A more recent award was the Arthur Schnitzler Prize, awarded in Vienna in 2019.

Mr Pollesch took over the Prater, the Volksbühne’s studio stage, at the end of 2001 and ran it until 2007. In plays such as ‘The City as Prey’ and ‘Insourcing Home – People in Grotty Hotels’ he criticized life under global capitalism. At the same time, he continued to work on the main stage of the theater. In total, he directed more than 40 Volksbühne productions until 2017.

One of the most popular was “Kill Your Darlings! Streets of Berladelphia,” a 2012 vehicle for one of Mr. Pollesch, Fabian Hinrichs, a charismatic actor who delivered a bitingly comic and physically energetic monologue surrounded by 14 gymnasts.

When Mr. Castorf was ousted in 2017, Mr. Pollesch of the Volksbühne also stopped working there and found temporary housing in Berlin, at the Deutsches Theater. In 2020, he and Mr. Hinrichs sold out a 2,000-seat revue theater in Berlin for another production that pitted the garrulous star against a group of silent dancers.

The show, “Believing in the Possibility of the Complete Renewal of the World,” was full of existential musings, both mundane and profound. along with electrifying performances set to a propulsive soundtrack.

In June 2019, when Mr. Pollesch’s appointment to lead the Volksbühne was announced, he indicated his intention to collaborate with actors, choreographers, artists and costume designers, whom he calls in English his “sisters and brothers in crime’.

However, he claimed to have no interest in running a theater in the usual way, organizing the usual opening night parties or publishing seasonal brochures. What was important to him, he said, was that he was an artistic director who “doesn’t behave properly and doesn’t do everything that is expected of him.”

When Mr. Pollesch began his term in 2021, he was the fourth person in four years to lead the Volksbühne. Many hoped that as a veteran of that famous radical house he would restore it to its former greatness. He was certainly credited with stabilizing the playhouse, but the acclaim the Volksbühne had previously known proved elusive.

The first new play he wrote and directed as artistic director, “The Rise and Fall of a Curtain and Its Life in Between,” was a quiet chamber piece in which four actors joked in Mr. Pollesch’s signature absurdist, borderline-obsessive style . dialogue. The production buzzing.

But although at his death he had not yet succeeded in restoring the Volksbühne to its former glory, he had been credited with introducing several artists to the house, including the choreographer Florentina Holzinger, who later received much acclaim.

Critics were also generally impressed with Mr. Pollesch’s final production in its first season, in 2022, “Geht es dir gut?” (“Are You Alright?”), partly a response to the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that year. The leading role was played by Mr. Hinrichs, supported by African and Bulgarian singing groups and a local breakdance group. Some critics viewed the work as a return to form for Mr. Pollesch.

Until the end, he remained committed to abandoning theatrical conventions with his unmistakable blend of pop culture, critical theory and manic performances.

“I don’t believe in dialogue. I don’t believe in a conspiracy. I don’t believe in storytelling. I believe in something else: in communication,” he had said in a 2007 interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I don’t interpret texts. I’m not using a metaphor. Our texts are very concrete, very direct. We try to communicate with people in the audience.”