Pfusch (Botch)

In his free theatre works of recent years, Herbert Fritsch has created something quite unique: a theatre that liberates artistic play from obsolete questions of meaning, that doesn’t tell stories, but rather composes image sequences, and that in all of this is not at all inaccessible, but rather a happy-faced avant-garde. In his final production at the powerhouse of his creations, the Berlin Volksbühne, Fritsch extends his physical theatre into a comprehensive piece of sound art. In its central section, the production is a polyphonous piano concerto, born from the spirit of early Modernism – mercilessly dissonant, physical, impelling. The other two parts allude to the end of the era of long-term artistic director Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne with discrete irony: At the start, Fritsch’s company of horrible aunts executes death-defying gymnastics on a colossal stage pipe, all the while paying homage to the theatre’s infrastructure. Following Castorf’s witticism about the end of his time as artistic director, that after his successor Chris Dercon, the Volksbühne could always be used as a “public swimming-pool”, the finale brings us synchronized swimming in a pool – with the highest possible style scores, of course. Because no-one knows this quite like Fritsch: “Timing is not a place in China”.

www.volksbuehne-berlin.de