Don't look at this city. Don't look at this theater. Not on his legends, his delusional sufferings and false declarations of love. Instead: look at this curtain. This fiery red, feather-light fabric. Which is otherwise never in the center, about which is otherwise never told. Here he is the main character. First it hangs seductively, as the limit of our perception, as the unleashers of our imagination. Then it rises and falls, begins to fly, forms many small tents or envelops the whole stage in a gentle silence. Supported by a multitude of traffic lights, the material chosen by Leonard Neumann floats through the area. A breath of nothing, a promise, also a concession to the surreal objectivity: suddenly a white rabbit appears underneath him and turns lost in a circle.
Leonard is the son of Bert Neumann, the stage designer who died early and who used to light up so many evenings here at the house.
So a little reverence to the past.
But there is no more reminiscence.
No biting cross-references for insiders of the theater, no connection to the long Castorf era, no departure from the fatal years of the interregnum: now something new is beginning.
But that happens without much fanfare, without fireworks.
The new artistic director René Pollesch modestly opens his first season at the Volksbühne in Berlin.
Almost as if he wanted to say: From now on it will be easy and honest again.
No megalomania.
We stick to our last.
Clever discourse fidgety
To the left and right of the portal, the beautiful portrait photographs of two circus performers are set up in gigantic enlargements: on the left a tamer in a glittering dress, a bouquet of flowers in her hand, looking expectantly straight ahead. On the right a tightrope walker in a bathrobe, leaning casually against a taut line, his hand behind his neck, his head tilted slightly to one side. These are the idols of the evening, the portal characters of the new season. Back to the circus is the motto, to the happy desire for change, to the allegedly pre-political beginning. “But what is a beginning?” The question is repeated on this simply beautiful evening, which has not been impressed by any current fashion. Because fashion, that was Pollesch himself for a long time, with its shrewd discourse fidgety and ironic fragmentary farces.Criticism of capitalism for late bourgeois academics with a sense for the post-dramatic game of disenchantment.
Now the zeitgeist has passed him by and has also declared him to be an old man who has now even landed in the previously hated position of ruler. But instead of apologizing and ingratiating themselves to the leveling theatrical taste of those who stand outside protesting in front of his house (the “people's stage squatters” still exist, they have now united with the “lateral thinkers”) and also sit in the audience, the “young ones People with gray hair, put on old make-up, ”asks Pollesch about what has long since seemed a thing of the past: the beauty of art.