René Pollesch

The usual critique of more or less every René Pollesch play is that the tension it starts with fades over its duration, especially after the first half hour. However, I think the significance of this declining curve is that it throws viewers back on themselves and their own situation in the theater. Thus it was yesterday with Service / No Service, where even the musical interludes had the effect of leaving you alone with your thoughts, letting you contemplate what you’d just seen and heard. The piece bids farewell to the old Volksbühne itself: instead of normal seating there’s a concrete ramp on which the public sits, quite uncomfortably. This demolition-site setup makes the approaching end of an era into a corporeal experience. The Volksbühne is supposed to be handed over to director Frank Castorf’s successor entirely empty—that is, unfurnished. As if to illustrate the theater’s uncertain future, the viewers are continuously being flushed out of their spots, forced to get up and make room, for example, for a Brechtian wagon that’s dragged through the audience. The resulting tumult allegorically signals that in this theater you have to be ready for anything. You have to be “flexible” to get used to the new situation.

Katrin Angerer’s first monologue is fantastic: she tries to downplay the fact that at a certain point, while playing Elektra, she lost her voice and had to leave the stage. Although the actress speaks uninterruptedly, she refers to a future in which she might fall silent and leave the Volksbühne. This talk of falling silent should also be read as a metaphor for the situation at the theater, where the stage designer Bert Neumann recently died. Again and again there’s talk of “Manufactum chairs,” after the high-end German department store, that are to be installed shortly, illustrating the shift to the sphere of the “beautiful,” meaning of course the sphere of the fine arts, for which the new theater director Chris Dercon stands as representative.

I also thought the reflections on the current state of the Left in the piece were accurate. The piece diagnoses a feeling of disconnection between the individual and the “whole” or the “world spirit.” Whereas earlier we still had hope, now we go on without hope. Another typical Pollesch trope is the conversion of the collective into the neoliberal ideal of the “team”—a team that is humorously depicted as acting in a more authoritarian fashion than the worst autocrat. In this piece, it’s the choir that plays the director—a monstrous multitude that does nothing but curse and insult. The fact that at times the viewer has to agonize through endless repetitions also has a certain significance. By the end, the spectators were completely exhausted, completely broken, from sitting so long on the hard concrete floor. I was glad for my throw pillow, which I had brought along as a precaution.

The title of the piece, Service / No Service, also alludes to the refusal of the Volksbühne workers to be taken as nothing more than service providers obligated to cooperate with the new landlords. Rejecting this charge, the stage space is here programmatically declared a zone of “no service” in which the actors continuously and paradoxically demand “service”—that is, something to eat and drink. On every level this play demonstrates that, with it, an era is ending.

Isabelle Graw, In Another World. Notes 2014-2017, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2021, 179 pages.

Isabelle Graw is the cofounder and publisher of TEXTE ZUR KUNST and teaches art history and theory at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. Her most recent publications include In Another World: Notes, 2014–2017 (Sternberg Press, 2020), Three Cases of Value Reflection: Ponge, Whitten, Banksy (Sternberg Press, 2021), and On the Benefits of Friendship (Sternberg Press, 2023).

Image credit: Bahar Kaygusuz