Stop Just Going Along:
The Dysfunctional Theatrics
of René Pollesch
Photo 1: Cinecittà Aperta (2009). From left to right: the boom-
mic operator, Christine Groß, Trystan Pütter, Martin Laberenz,
Catrin Striebeck, Inga Busch, and the prompter.
Photo: Thomas Aurin
T
he actors run breathlessly between trailers,
shadowed by a prompter, a videographer, a
boom-mic operator, and a grip. They’re filming a
movie, and also maybe producing a theatre production,
or rehearsing for both. We, the audience for this happy
mess, sit amid the trailers in white plastic lawn chairs,
craning our necks to follow the action live, or else watching
it on the projection screens. Inga Busch, Christine Groß,
Martin Laberenz, Trystan Pütter, and Catrin Striebeck,
their “characters” named after them, constantly undercut
their own intentions, fail to remember their lines, reveal
their weaknesses, and repeat themselves, satirizing mid-
century Italian and German film and their own production.
[Photo 1] Working as an ensemble in German director and
playwright René Pollesch’s Cinecittà Aperta (2009), they
refuse to represent a coherent world.
In his astoundingly large body of work over the last
decade, Pollesch tries and tries again to create a functional
political theatre in the dysfunctional world of late-
capitalism, which he sees as having monetized life and
collapsed the borders of the simulated and the simulation,
both in economics and entertainment. Reveling in the
58 TheatreForum
By Matt
Cornish
simultaneous unreality and reality of the theatre situation,
its aesthetic lying and its corporeal truth, Pollesch seeks
to create functional, or rather, effective politics with
dysfunctional theatre.
Born in the town of Friedberg in West Germany in 1962,
Pollesch attended the Gießen Institute for Applied Theatre
Studies, where he trained under Hans-Thies Lehmann,
Heiner Müller, and Robert Wilson, among others. Gießen
has produced a long list of notable German theatre artists
and performance collectives—including members of Rimini
Protokoll, Showcase Beat Le Mot, and She She Pop—who
have made names for themselves by challenging Aristotelian
modes of theatrical story-telling, applying new media, and
exploring the dynamics of representation and so-called
‘authenticity’ inside and outside of theatre buildings. To
Matt Cornish is a Doctor of Fine Arts candidate at
the Yale School of Drama, writing his dissertation
on representations of history in the post-reunification
German theatre. In 2010–2011, while researching and
writing this article, he was a Fulbright Graduate Fellow at
the Freie Universität Berlin. Currently a Teaching Fellow
in the Yale Theater Studies Department, his essays have
appeared in PAJ, TDR (upcoming), Theater, Theatre
Journal, and elsewhere.
make a rough comparison with artists in the United States,
Pollesch’s work resembles the associative philosophical
discourse of Richard Foreman combined with the mad, fun
play with pop-culture forms and live video by companies
like the Big Art Group.
Pollesch struggled for nearly a decade after graduating
from Gießen, suffering from writer’s block and making
a living through a few small grants and by translating
plays (especially comedies) for the Theater am Turm in
Frankfurt. In the late 1990s, he began to get productions
for his plays, and especially attracted attention with Heidi
Hoh in 1999 (Podewil Berlin). His idiosyncratic texts and
productions—he always, and only, directs his own work—
distinguish him from any other playwright or director.
This attention soon became major praise: his play series
world wide web-slums (2000) won him the Mülheim
Dramatists’ Prize (considered the most important German
prize for playwriting); and his so-called “Prater-Trilogy”
(City as Prey / Insourcing the Home. People in Crap
Hotels / SEX) was invited to the 2002 Theatertreffen, the
festival which annually brings the ten “most noteworthy”
German-language productions of the year to Berlin. In
2001, beginning with this trilogy, Pollesch took over the
artistic direction of the Prater theatre in Berlin, the second
space of the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. The
Prater became his central artistic home, even as he worked
throughout Germany; he has directed over 25 plays there
(stepping down as artistic director in 2007). Working at the
impressively prolific rate of several premieres per season
since Heidi Hoh, he has also been named playwright of
the year by Theater heute (2002), and won an additional
Mülheim Prize (in 2006 for Cappuccetto Rosso).
On the page, the texts look somewhat similar to plays
by Sarah Kane or Martin Crimp. Pollesch usually denotes
speakers by one letter, usually an initial of the actor who
originates the role. The names of figures, which occasionally
appear in the dialogue, can shift between the actors; a reader
cannot locate a character, or, as Pollesch says, a “middle-
class, autonomous subject” (“Ich bin Heidi Hoh” 347; all
translations in this article are mine). Pollesch builds his
discourse through improvisation in rehearsal, sampling
from a mixture of social science theory, gender studies,
Marxist philosophy, American B-movies, and business-
school-speak—often taken from articles and books sitting
on his directing table. The process of making texts through
collaborative rehearsals is central to their final production
in performance. And though some have been published,
the texts cannot be separated from this process, or from the
productions that emerge. This is one reason that Pollesch
not only always directs his own plays, but actually goes
so far as to bar others from directing them. Passages of
text, complex sometimes to the point of silliness, develop
associatively, looping and accumulating over the course
of the play, building slowly in the consciousness of the
audience, which cannot understand the first time around.
Though Pollesch often hangs these theoretical loops on
bits of plot that feel ripped from pop-culture scenarios, no
situation emerges; the ideas are the thing.
In practice, Pollesch asks his actors to “Haul this
block of text into your brain and don’t identify with it,” to
perform with “Ceremonial speed, ceremonial hysteria,” and
to “Let the body be taken by the loudness” of the capitalized
words. (quoted in Brandl-Risi 17). Throughout the roughly
one-hour productions, the actors perform frenetically, like
hyperactive children. They play back Pollesch’s fusion of
television pop-news, soap-opera, and advertisements in
a wild, channel-hopping style. Occasionally, the actors
exhaust themselves, and take breaks to sit for a moment and
drink from plastic water bottles. A prompter follows in their
wake (or tries to), giving them lines when they lose their
place—the inevitable result of trying to deliver large chunks
of Pollesch’s language at a frenzied pace. Along with the
prompter, boom-mic operators and video camera-people
often scamper behind the actors, trying to capture their
words and expressions.
In forming an oppositional dramaturgy—against
capitalist “white, male, heterosexual” story-telling
(Dialektisches Theater Now!” 305) —Pollesch takes cues
from Brecht, in whose Lehrstücke (teaching-learning plays),
as Pollesch says, “There’s no information there about
who’s speaking.” In other words, Brecht ignores character
psychology. And, Pollesch continues, “When nobody’s
sitting there any more, under there, with or without the
printed play, then you can hear something” (Sie haben jetzt
wieder nur . . . gehört” 62). We only listen to characters,
but we can hear ideas; the first step towards speaking with
audiences is that they can hear you. So Pollesch takes the
Lehrstück, with its focus on ideas over character, as well
as Brecht’s Verfremdungeffekt (estrangement effect), and
radicalizes them: with a barrage of ideas, superfluity of
information, rejection of dramatic plotting, and outright
refusal to represent characters. Pollesch uses these
methods—along with the failures and imperfections of
the actors, and the playful, inconclusive monologues on
ideas and ideologies—to open his productions to individual
experience. By pushing the actors to (and beyond) their
limits as performers, and by having them followed around
by an overtaxed technical crew, Pollesch exposes the work,
the physical and artistic labor, that goes into creating his
theatre.
The technique of overtaxing actors began early in
Pollesch’s career, and was in fact even more evident. In
part two of the Pratertrilogie, Insourcing the Home. People
in Crap Hotels, three female actors run between a series
of hotel or apartment-looking rooms that surround the
audience on three sides, outfitted with televisions and
old couches and wallpaper. Swiveling on desk chairs to
follow the action live and on a large projection screen,
the audience watches Claudia Splitt (C), Nina Kronjäger
(N) and Christine Groß (T) go at it, speaking rapidly and
TheatreForum 59
Photo 2: Insourcing the Home (2001). Claudia Splitt (foreground)
goes on a rampage while Christine Groß (background left) and
Nina Kronjäger (background right) observe from the next room.
Photo: Thomas Aurin
without pauses, exploding where the capital letters indicate
[Photo 2]: “C: Which social practices are meant to produce
the concept of ‘being at home’ in this hotel? T: And do they
discard heterosexual norms? N: That WOULD REALLY BE
SOMETHING NEW! SHIT! THAT WOULD REALLY BE
SOMETHING NEW! A GAY HOTEL! C: ISDN or LSD-
Hotel. N: In this ISDN-Hotel I can plug in my laptop. Then
it lives there, and I work there too.”
The loud, fast conversation revolves around the
disappearing border between home and work, and between
hotel and home (“N: This hotel HERE reminds me of being
at home. T: And that’s service”). At home and at work
and at home/work, they are whores producing emotions
and feelings for their boss—and are served by the whorish
hotel staff. “Hetero-capitalist means of production,” as T
says, convert private spaces into marketplaces, and enforce
homogenous, conservative social norms. Pollesch connects
this to the central problem of Ridley Scott’s 1992 film Blade
Runner: “N: The personnel manager in this Home-As-
Product-Hotel must subject his employees to some sort of
emotion-test. Like in Blade Runner. Because emotions and
home are PRODUCTS here after all.”
Periodically, the stream of text breaks off into what
Pollesch calls “Clips,” and the actors gulp water or break out
60 TheatreForum
physically from sitting or standing and yelling at each other
to release manic energy into the room. Using a swivel office
chair as a pretend helicopter, they reproduce the helicopter
landing scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
(1979), complete with Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”
blaring from a tape player; later, they pop popcorn and
throw the kernels at one another.
The space for Insourcing (also used for City as Prey
and SEX), designed by Bert Neumann, intensifies the
claustrophobic feeling of a normalizing society engulfing
the individual: televisions flicker with various images
(one plays a dog training video throughout), and actors
disappear from sight under blankets and can only be
seen, thanks to the omnipresent cameraman, on the large
projector screen. Surrounded by live action on the stage,
with the video on the projection screen providing another
point of view (and short staircases giving the actors easy
access to the crowd, seated close anyway), Insourcing
confronts the audience with a superfluity of visual data, not
to mention textual, cultural and theoretical information.
Audience members swing around on their chairs
(reminders of office work as well as a mode of individual
freedom), crane their necks, and craft their own story.
Many of the early Prater productions, including the
other two works in the Pratertrilogie, as well as the previous
year’s “soap-opera series” world wide web-slums at the
Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, share an obsession
with, as the critic Frauke Meyer-Gosau puts it, “a reality
that has become ‘unreal’ or ‘surreal,’ that now only Photo 3: JFK (2009). Judith Hofmann (right) threatens Katrin
exists as ‘Simulation’—of work, love, health, and sensual Wichmann with a pistol, with a projection of Felix Knopp singing
on the wall above them. Photo: Arno Declair
perceptions” (10). Since 1989, when capitalism became the
only economic and political option in Europe, mimetic
entertainment like theatre and film (for Pollesch) has taken
an ever increasing and dangerous role in supporting a
repressive system of representation, and in losing reality
in simulacra. Pollesch’s late-capitalist figures cannot
distinguish the “replicants” (to use the term from Blade
Runner) from the people, because people have turned
themselves into replicants. Pollesch’s individuals protect
themselves from becoming capitalist heterosexual androids
by burrowing deep into popular-culture, and by creating
non-psychological avatars. Groß, Splitt, and Kronjäger
speak together for the first time at the end of Insourcing,
screaming at the audience: “DO NOT PRODUCE HOME.”
This is Pollesch’s project (seldom is he clearer than in
this moment), driving both his texts and his theatrical
techniques: stop just going along.
Since these first productions, this continues to be
Pollesch’s project, even as his choice of techniques
and themes have developed to address a changing (and
increasingly insidiously capitalist) world. Though the
“Clips” remain, sometimes breathers for the actors
and sometimes wild physical exercises, many of the
more extreme elements of his productions (the constant
screaming, the extraordinarily fast talking, the repeated
SHITS!) have ebbed. The focus of the productions has
shifted away from the effects on the subject of the internet
and all-consuming commercialization, though these still
make cameo appearances. Playing with modes of comedy,
exploring the reality of theatre, and exposing the unreality Standing behind the flats of the spare but realistic box set
of historical film, Pollesch continues to search for new designed by Janina Audick, his video image projected on
answers to one central question: lost in layers of simulacra a large screen above the upstage wall, he thinks out loud:
in a hegemonically commercial world, how can a theatre “I take a drag on my cigarette and wait. For my cue. I’m
artist create political theatre that can reach audiences? How pretty sure I passed it. No biggie, I think. She says: No,
can we stop just going along? that was it! Really? She nods her head, says: Yeah, yeah,
The form and techniques of comedy provide a mode for yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was it, get out there, you need
many Pollesch productions, especially in the last few years. to get out there. I just stand there and take a drag on my
Taken together, text and performance creates ridiculous cigarette.” Onstage in the bedroom-styled set, when they’re
situations that, at their best, are rollickingly funny. His not making fun of the director Michael Thalheimer,
work follows in the tradition of comedies like the plays he among other theatre contemporaries, the actors enact a
translated early in his career (including Joe Orton’s farce complicated love-triangle play, which naturally gets
What the Butler Saw). He says that “[c]omedies by Feydeau confused with the backstage drama and with questions
or Labiche are formats that you can play around with”; they about the failures of communism. [Photo 3] A line from
can serve as “vehicle[s] for what we have to say” (“Ich bin the text, first said by K (Katrin Wichmann) and repeated by
der Antiromantiker” 357). F, gives the play it’s subtitle: “And when I think about you,
In JFK (2009, Deutsches Theater Berlin)—the name I can only think about the project of the communist party,
stands for the first initials of the three actors, and has giving up working on the communist project to participate
nothing to do with President Kennedy—Pollesch recreates in building up capitalism, you ass, you!”
a backstage/onstage comedy in the vein of Michael Frayn’s Pollesch’s productions work less in the vein of
Noises Off, complete with an actor named F, played by situational comedy, even while sometimes using its
Felix Knopp, who doesn’t really want to go on stage or tropes as a vehicle for his obsessions, than Aristophanic
perform his role. Knopp raps/sings his way through much satire: disregarding logical plot and character in order
of the play, in the style of R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet.”

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 a similar way,  Pollesch’s
actors exist between their
roles, their individual
personalities, and the
playwright who set down
the text, as they speak
to the audience, often
through the ubiquitous
video camera that has
been following them.
But Pollesch extends the
concept almost reductio ad
absurdum:  his productions
consist mostly of parabises.
The parabasis sections
in JFK address the ontology
of life versus performance,
questioning which
separates you more from
your authentic self, a major
Photo 4: The Perfect Day (2010). Fabian Hinrichs begins his theme in Pollesch’s work
“perfect day” by showering. Photo: Thomas Aurin over the past few years. In an interview given in March
2007, Pollesch tells a story about the German author Uwe
to emphasize bodily humor and sharp laughter, often Johnson: “He lived with a woman for 17 years, and she was
politically or socially critical. In fact, Pollesch’s plays in truth the wife of a secret agent, who had been assigned
resemble the parabasis sections of Aristophanes’ comedies, to him” (“Ich bin Heidi Hoh,” 369). Johnson, Pollesch says,
in which the Greek playwright used a chorus to directly died shortly thereafter of a broken heart. (He did, in fact,
address his audience on political and artistic matters. In pass away two years after writing Sketch of an Accident-

Photo 5: The Perfect Day (2010). Fabian Hinrichs

(left) expounds upon the story of Uwe Johnson as
Volker Spengler (center) listens.
Photo: Thomas Aurin

62 TheatreForum
 Photo 6: Throw Away Your Ego (2011). Scene designer Bert
Victim in 1982, a novel about an author confronted by this Neumann’s literal fourth wall, with a projection of Martin
very situation.) In the summer of 2010, this story became Wuttke from “backstage.” Photo: Thomas Aurin
the central anecdote of The Perfect Day, which premiered
much less their specific years, and must rely on the
in an outdoor space (designed by Neumann) in Mülheim
prompter to help him continue, as the audience cheers him
an der Ruhr as the third part of Pollesch’s Ruhrtrilogie.
on. After he finally struggles through to the finish, Hinrichs
(Pollesch likes to work around ideas several times, and the
announces the 101st most important invention: “the perfect
Johnson story also appeared in at least one production I did
day,” which he then proceeds to create for us.
not see: Solidarity is Suicide, Münchener Kammerspiele,
Towards the end of the production, taking a cue from
2007).
the genial and corpulent Volker Spengler (another frequent
The Perfect Day stars Fabian Hinrichs (who first worked
Pollesch actor), here dressed as a kind of modern Greek god
with Pollesch in the Pratertrilogie) as Fabian Hinrichs,
in a white muscle tank and a crown of sea-shells, Hinrichs
riding onto the scene on a bicycle to the sounds of R.
shifts from discussing the perfect day to perfection in life
Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix).” Almost ten years after the Prater
and love. [Photo 5] “I’ll tell the following story: A man
Trilogy, Hinrichs no longer relies on manic energy and
had a life plan, he wanted to have the ‘perfect marriage,’
rapidly spoken lines, but rather his lanky body, often shown
so basically nothing special. He wanted to have a marriage
off with nothing but underwear as cover, along with his
that really worked.” This is Uwe Johnson, who perhaps
quirky expressions, and his ability to stand alone in space
could have been saved from his early death with a different
and connect to the audience. [Photo 4] Originally set in an
world view: he needed to understand that “as a lie the story
empty field (I saw it performed in the Volksbühne, with a
was real.” Hinrichs continues, “This perfect life, that was
solitary tuft of grass on stage nodding to the first setting),
the invention! And this life that you have to believe in, that
framed by scattered trailers, scaffolding with neon lettering
interests me.”
reading “La Camera de la Muerte,” and a giant balloon-
This conscious belief in lies is the everyday experience
moon, The Perfect Day actually has a bit of a through line.
of the theatre audience, but Pollesch wants to extend it
Hinrichs begins the performance by listing, in a satire of the
into life. “This story brings aesthetic illusion into the real
BBC, the “100 most important inventions of mankind,” all
world. As aesthetic illusion.” Hinrichs ends the production
the way from the pointed rock at number one (1.5 million
with a magic trick, making the young man who follows
years ago), to the nanometer (number 100, invented 2000).
him around with a boom-mic disappear. Even while a
Of course, Hinrichs cannot remember all one hundred,
projection screen shows the man below the stage, revealing

TheatreForum 63
 Photo 7: Throw Away Your Ego (2011). Martin Wuttke (center) tries to explain the mind-body divide to
so-and-so (left) and the chorus (right).
the “truth” behind the magic, Hinrichs wonders if we can
“cross into the next society. In which we invent another
type of individual. A being that does not slavishly cling to
the truth.” Maybe that would be the progress only promised
by the BBC’s list of inventions.
Pollesch explicitly explored this desire for appearance to
match being, or at least to be able to believe in the lies that
are life, in one of his most recent productions, Throw Away
Your Ego (2011, Volksbühne). Neumann designed a mind-
bending set, which extends the walls of the Volksbühne’s
auditorium across the front of the stage, literally building
a fourth wall between the spectators and the actors. [Photo
6] In other words, other than a thin apron on the forestage,
where about half of the action takes place after the first ten
minutes, Neumann cuts off the stage from the audience,
which can only see the performance via a video projected
onto the new wall: actors and audience exist in separate
rooms, each surrounded by four walls. Referencing French
philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s examination of the Cartesian
mind-body split (the program lists Nancy’s Corpus as
recommended reading), Martin Wuttke tries to figure out
why we only perceive souls and not bodies. [Photo 7] We
look at our bodies like we look at money: seeing only the
inner “worth,” and not the material: “That’s why I was
so disoriented,” he exclaims. “Because I was supposed to
believe in some sort of inner being, but it didn’t exist. I
only exist on the outside. Me. The mouth and the spirit are
one and the same!” About ten minutes into Throw Away
64 TheatreForum
Photo: Thomas Aurin
Your Ego, Wuttke (one of the most accomplished actors in
Germany, and another frequent Pollesch performer) blows
open a panel in the forth wall, allowing the actors to walk
onto the apron where the audience can see them directly,
confusing the inner and the outer that this world had tried
so carefully to separate. “Inner-life doesn’t work any more,”
he shouts. It’s all appearance, all aesthetics, if we would only
look.
As much as Pollesch celebrates representation,
he remains deeply skeptical of how representative
entertainment, especially cinema, uses signs (costumes,
scenery, etc.) to hide its techniques, to allow the audience
to forget that they’re watching fiction, telling stories that
reinforce damaging social norms. This extends to theatre as
well. Pollesch uses an unruly chorus in A Chorus is Violently
Wrong (2009, Volksbühne im Prater) in part to satirize
the work of German director Volker Lösch, who famously
inserts choruses of “real” people telling their “own”
stories into his productions: Berlin sex workers in a 2010
adaptation of Frank Wedekind’s Lulu at the Schaubühne
Berlin, for example. Lösch confuses the apparent
authenticity of his non-actors for truth. Pollesch finds truth
not in attempting to hide or abjure representation, but
instead in embracing it.
Abstracted to the point of simulacra, representation
can became dangerous for Pollesch, as shown during the
world-wide recession that began in 2008, sparked by trading
in mortgage-backed securities that created wealth from thin
air and then destroyed it. He addresses this explicitly in I’m

Photo 8: I’m Looking You in the Eyes, Social Context of Deception (2010).
Fabian Hinrichs dangles from designer Bert Neumann’s enormous disco
ball. Photo: Thomas Aurin
Looking You in the Eyes, Social Context of Deception (2010),
a one-man production at the Volksbühne performed by
Fabian Hinrichs. The Verblendung of the original German
title, which I’ve translated above as “deception,” means the
dazzlement that can occur when appearance is taken for reality;
the dazzlement, in other words, of bankers and home-buyers
mistaking the appearance of AAA-bonds and low-interest
loans for the real thing. In this situation, which did not of
course end with the economic crash, “The reality of these
goods plays absolutely no role,” Hinrichs says, standing in his
underwear in the middle of the enormous, empty Volksbühne
main-stage (designed by Neumann). As in many of his other
productions, like Throw Your Ego Away, Pollesch offers the
human body— “the perpetual protest,” as Hinrichs says—as
an alternative to Verblendung. Hinrichs displays his body as
a body throughout, but most memorably by dangling at least
ten feet above the stage from an enormous multi-colored
disco ball, his muscles straining. [Photo 8] The context and
history of that body, in terms of previous roles he’s played
and more generally in society, take a central role in the
performance; Hinrichs announces that this is “clearly a white,
male heterosexual who’s speaking here, from a platform that
belongs only to him.” The key here is the openness about
the representative power Pollesch and Hinrichs put on
display, which stands in strong contrast to capitalism, with
its reliance on blind belief.
The mutually-supportive/destructive system of
representation and capitalism is especially damaging for
artists and audience when it comes to portraying history.
In Cinecittà Aperta, the second part of the Ruhrtrilogie,
which premiered in 2009, one year before The Perfect Day,
Pollesch confronts the gap between “history,” personal
origins, and the here and now of the bodies representing
that history, as his figures struggle to shoot a historical film
in the neo-realist style of Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year
Zero (1948).
Set like The Perfect Day in a field in Mülheim, this time
the audience sits on white plastic lawn chairs between the
trailers, instead of away and looking towards them. (As
with The Perfect Day, I saw Cinecittà Aperta on the stage
of the Volksbühne; Neumann placed trailers and audience
on the main stage.) Inga Busch, Christine Groß, Martin
Laberenz, Trystan Pütter, and Catrin Striebeck smear their
faces with coal to look dirty and “historical.” While a large
fan (brought in cheaply from Poland) blows smoke across
the stage, Groß charges around as the great theatre director
“Erna Grabowski” ordering a rotating stage, and Striebeck
declares that she’s sick of playing Trümmerfrauen (the
“rubble women” who helped clear bombed-out German
cities after World War II). [Photos 1 and 9]
With their costumes, their make-up, their wind
machines, and their black and white film (projected on
a screen), the figures in Cinecittà Aperta feel completely
dislocated historically. “Tine: What you’re calling historical
is actually ahistorical. This here is historical (pinches her).
Catrin: Ow! Tine: That’s historical!” Their bodies have pasts,
have evolved genetically and led to the now. As Pollesch
explains in the online description of Cinecittà Aperta, and
in various ways in the text as well, “Darwin can elucidate
where I come from, but not History. Not Germany Year
Zero.” Pollesch’s director figure in Cinecittà Aperta tries to
subvert this. “Martin: Listen up, you dirty slob you! We need
your body for a historical film. It’s about historical subjects in
Germany Year Zero. Trystan: No, I don’t want to! This here
[pointing at his body] is historical!”
Representative entertainment, in other words, denies or
has forgotten its own reality: the actual bodies performing
and observing the performance. Artists, or perhaps better said
content producers, have embraced stories that not only make
no sense today, but cause actual harm, to the actors personally
(who must embody the roles) and to the audiences who watch
them. Pollesch has emphasized repeatedly in interviews,
“When an author writes: ‘First Scene. A woman steps onto
the stage,’ then he’s already writing in jargon,” (Ich bin der
Antiromantiker” 360) which he defines elsewhere as “the
white, male, heterosexual jargon, which is the measure of all
things” (“Dialektisches Theater Now!” 305). In other words,
standard dramaturgy, and the selling and buying necessarily
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 Photo 9: Cinecittà Aperta (2009). From left to right: the
videographer, Catrin Striebeck, Martin Laberenz, Christine
Groß, and Inga Busch. Photo: Thomas Aurin
involved in theatre and television, reinforces gender and
sexual norms, shaping a false reality. Laberenz addresses
this in reference to his “character’s” film: “This split screen
is romantic, it only serves the social-economic illusions of
the declining middle-class. Stop it immediately!” (Once
again: stop just going along!) In wanting to tell, and more
importantly sell, their stories to middleclass audiences, films
obscure and distort the truth of the past and the now.
Pollesch’s Aristophanic satire, his joy in pop-culture
detritus, his questioning of the efficacy and politics of
representation within the theatre, all privilege the presence
of the actors as performers and individuals (as opposed
to representational tools). He thinks out loud, and not
just in one production, but over his entire corpus, playing
with ideas in different ways in different productions. And
rather than representing these ideas in distracting stories,
Pollesch’s productions manifest them in the performance
spaces, the bodies of the actors, and the words of the
text. In a dysfunctional world, totalizingly capitalistic,
separated from its material reality, Pollesch creates an
incomplete theatre experience of failure—our failure in
the audience to understand, the performers’ failure on
stage to perform, to tell stories, or to represent anything.
In this situation, we cannot just go along. For the hour of
each performance, we work in solidarity to sort through
the complex political and social problems that loop
through his plays and the theatrics of our lives.
66 TheatreForum
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(2007): 9–37.
Brocher, Corinna, ed. world wide web-slums. Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2003.
Meyer-Gosau, Frauke. “Ändere dich, Situation. Rene
Polleschs politisch-romantisches Project der WWW-
Slums.” Brocher, ed. world wide web-slums. 9–26.
Pollesch, René. “Cinecittà Aperta: Ruhrtrilogie Teil 2 von
René Pollesch.” Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.
http://www.volksbuehne-berlin.de/praxis/cinecitta_
aperta/. Accessed 8 September 2011.
---. “Dialektisches Theater Now! Brechts Emtfremdungs-
Effekt.” Liebe ist kälter als das Kapital. 301–305.
---, interviewed by Jürgen Berger. “Ich bin Heidi Hoh.”
Brocher, ed. world wide web-slums. 341–48.
---, interviewed by Romano Pocai, Martin Saar, and Ruth
Sonderegger. “Wie kann man darstellen, was uns
ausmacht?” Liebe ist kälter als das Kapital. 327–46.
---, interviewed by Wolfgang Kralicek. “Ich bin der
Antiromantiker.” Liebe ist kälter als das Kapital. 357–64.
---. Liebe ist kälter als das Kapital: Stücke, Texte, Material.
Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2009.
---. “Sie haben jetzt wieder nur . . . gehört!” Ruhrtrilogie
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Luxemburg-Platz, 2010. 59–63.
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