Since his apprentice years at the Institute for Applied Theatre Sciences in Gießen, the only drama school in Germany where theory and practice are taught with reference to each other, Pollesch has been following a fundamental idea: to combine television entertainment and academic discussions in a way suitable for the stage. By crossing these formats, each of which is frowned upon individually on the stage, Pollesch has created a Theatre of Hysteria that is singular in its dynamics and intensity.
Mental games on terms such as outsourcing, city marketing, globalisation or networking, which Pollesch quotes and combines from text books, are turned into dialogue a kind of satirical montage. Overtaxed city people then use these texts to discuss their emotional misery as permanent shouting. This results in Ally McBeal as a left-wing bookstore on speed.
As already implied in the play titles, the unique language of these plays acquires both absurd and very specific qualities in this process. If the actors are discussing the question as to whether desire is only an instrument of the capitalist usage chain, the political evaluation of the naïve luxury of the First Worlds appears extremely serious. At the same time, Pollesch’s artificial language arouses discomfort about the jargon from university and TV used, which are actually not so dissimilar in terms of their actual emptiness of meaning. It is only the grotesque humour that this mixture of overloaded and banal expression develops that allows the great success of his plays among a mainly young audience.
Another characteristic of Pollesch Theatre is the high level of aggression. The three actors, who form the basic model of this stage situation, convert the overheating with theories and associations, which Pollesch dictates to them, into a permanent nervous breakdown. The subconscious constantly breaks through the controlled surface of slaves to capitalism and gallops away like mad in yelled cascades of words. Given the rapid pace of the text output, the prompt is an integral part of the production. A shouted “Shit” indicates the need for a prompt, which then comes.
Pollesch not only works as a director and writer (for which he has won the Mülheimer Dramatists’ Prize, among others), but he has also developed a symbolism-laden trash aesthetics comprising pop rubbish, plush, karaoke, words and western tools that is no less demanding of the attention than the text and the pace. Productions by other directors, such as Stefan Pucher’s attempt with the Pollesch text “True Love is Traded in Bank Raids”, tend to appear forceless in comparison to this manic orgy of culture.
The idea of the series as a metaphor for the repetition compulsion and acceleration not only leads to serial productions ("Heidi Hoh” in Berlin or “www-slums 1-10” at the Humburg Schauspielhaus), but also to the constant recycling of text fragments for new productions. Thus, in just a few years Pollesch’s rapid productivity has led to a comprehensive coverage of German-speaking major theatre and, however, to a certain degree of exhaustion of the means.
With the reinvention of his 1992 production “Splatter Boulevard” at Hamburg’s Schauspielhaus in 2003, however, he managed the leap into the biggest German theatre format with a crazy criminal comedy. In this new challenge his critical-hysterical funniness clearly gained a new dimension. The Future is Unwritten.
