René Pollesch, a prolific playwright and stage director whose work — intellectually serious yet irreverent, chatty, goofy and riddled with pop culture references — made him one of the most significant forces in German theater of the past three decades, died on Monday in Berlin. He was 61.
His death was announced by the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz theater, where he had been artistic director since 2021. No cause was given.
Mr. Pollesch (pronounced POL-esh) wrote roughly 200 plays and directed a vast majority of them himself, often at 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 publicly funded playhouse in what once was East Berlin, that had a reputation for daring and provocative theatermaking.
Mr. Pollesch took over leadership of the theater after years of managerial turmoil set off by the dismissal of the company’s longtime artistic director, Frank Castorf, in 2017. When Mr. Pollesch arrived, two others in the top post had come and gone, and the theater was craving stability.
In his two and a half seasons at the helm, he staged nine original plays, eight of which remain in the theater’s repertoire. The most recent, “ja nichts ist okay” (“yes nothing is okay”) premiered on Feb. 11.
He had earlier run the theater’s smaller, off-site venue, the Prater, and directed dozens of productions both there and in the main house.
Mr. Pollesch’s plays, usually under 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 quirky performances, all developed with his favorite actors, including Sophie Rois, Fabian Hinrichs and Martin Wuttke, who essentially became his co-creators.
Many of his productions achieved cultlike status in Berlin and elsewhere, but the intensely collaborative way he devised his plays with his trusted actors made it tricky for other directors to stage his work, which remained largely defined by their original casts and productions. While his works have been seen throughout Europe and even in Tokyo and Brazil, to date, none of his works have been staged in the United States.
In a 2006 essay in the journal Contemporary Theatre Review, the scholar David Barnett suggested that Mr. Pollesch’s work, sometimes labeled diskurstheater (“discourse theater”), did not easily translate to an Anglo-American context. His “sustained popularity is perhaps difficult for the English-speaking reader to comprehend, as many of the plays are devoid of both character and plot,” Dr. Barnett, a professor of theater at the University of York, wrote.
The critic Peter Laudenbach wrote in an appraisal on Tuesday in the Munich-based newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung that Mr. Pollesch had “developed his own form of theater,” calling it “extremely entertaining and at the same time on par with advanced sociological debates.”
“The acting was virtuosic, stunningly casual, 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: critiques of capitalism with fun and sophisticated entertainment like in the better sort of boulevard theater, preferably with music by the Beach Boys or Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon.’”
René Pollesch was born on Oct. 29, 1962, in Friedberg, a town close to 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 majored in applied theater studies at the University of Giessen, close to his hometown, and wrote plays on a weekly basis, staging them with his classmates.
After graduating, he briefly ran his own theater company in Frankenthal, a town in southwest Germany, before working as a playwright and producer at the Theater am Turn in Frankfurt. In 1996, he won a scholarship to work and study at the Royal Court Theater in London, where he participated in seminars led by the playwrights Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill.
A turning point in his career came in 2001, when, at 39, he won the Mulheim Playwright’s Prize, one of Germany’s top theatrical honors, for “world wide web-slums,” a seven-part “theater soap” that premiered at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. The Mulheim jury singled out the play’s “desperate comedy.” He won the prize a second time in 2006. A more recent accolade was the Arthur Schnitzler Prize, awarded in Vienna in 2019.
Mr. Pollesch took over the Prater, the Volksbühne’s studio stage, in late 2001 and ran it until 2007. In plays like “The City as Prey” and “Insourcing Home — People in Grotty Hotels,” he critiqued life under global capitalism. At the same time, he continued working on the theater’s main stage. In all, he staged more than 40 Volksbühne productions until 2017.
One of the most popular was “Kill Your Darlings! Streets of Berladelphia,” a vehicle in 2012 for one of Mr. Pollesch’s favorite collaborators, Fabian Hinrichs, a charismatic actor who delivered a mordantly comic and physically energetic monologue surrounded by 14 gymnasts.
When Mr. Castorf was ousted in 2017, Mr. Pollesch from the Volksbühne also stopped working there, finding a temporary home 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 its garrulous star against a group of silent dancers.
The show, “Believing in the Possibility of the World’s Complete Renewal,” was full of existential ruminations, both humdrum and profound, along with exhilarating performances set to a propulsive soundtrack.
In June 2019, when Mr. Pollesch’s appointment to lead the Volksbühne was announced, he signaled his intention to work collaboratively with actors, choreographers, artists and costume designers, whom he called, in English, his “sisters and brothers in crime.”
He professed, though, to have no interest in managing a theater in the usual way, organizing the customary opening night parties or publishing season brochures. What was important to him, he said, was being an artistic director who “doesn’t behave properly and doesn’t do everything that’s expected of him.”
When Mr. Pollesch started his tenure in 2021, he was the fourth person to run the Volksbühne in four years. Many hoped that as a veteran of that famously radical house, he would restore it to its former greatness. He was certainly credited with stabilizing the playhouse, but the acclaim that the Volksbühne had known before 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 low-key chamber piece in which four actors bantered in the Mr. Pollesch’s signature absurdist, borderline-obsessive dialogue. The production fizzled.
But if, at his death, he hadn’t yet succeeded in restoring the Volksbühne to its former luster, he had won credit for introducing several artists to the house, including the choreographer Florentina Holzinger, who went on to wide acclaim.
Critics were also generally impressed with Mr. Pollesch’s final production in his first season, in 2022, “Geht es dir gut?” (“Are You Alright?”), in part a response to the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that year. It starred Mr. Hinrichs, backed by African and Bulgarian singing groups as well as a local break-dancing troupe. Some critics considered the work a return to form for Mr. Pollesch.
To the end, he remained committed to shedding theatrical conventions with his unmistakable mix of pop culture, critical theory and manic performances.
“I don’t believe in dialogue. I don’t believe in plot. 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 don’t use metaphor. Our texts are very concrete, very direct. We try and communicate with people in the audience.”
