Friedrich dÜrrenmatt

The Visit

A brief biography

January 5, 1921

To

Dec. 14, 1990

  • Swiss author and dramatist, wrote in German

  • Known for avant-garde drama

  • Born in Konolfingen, Bern

  • Son of a Protestant minister

  • Grandfather, a satirical writer and political activist.

  • Tried to study painting (was an expressionist painter) and philosophy

  • Also studied German literature

  • Gave up academics to begin a career as a writer

  • For a time he was also a theatre critic

  • He wrote an essay called “Theatre Problems” which it is important for us to examine

  • It explicates his idea of theatre

Theatre Problems

  • “I want to ask you also not to regard me as a representative of any particular movement in theatre….For me, the stage is not a field for theories, philosophies, and declarations, but an instrument, the possibilities of which I seek to know by playing with it.”

  • “It is not Aristotle’s unities that make Greek tragedy possible, it is Greek tragedy that makes Aristotle’s unities possible.”

  • Talks of the concept of “backstory” which supports the unities. He says, “Greek tragedy had the advantage of not having to invent a backstory, because it already had one: the spectators knew the myths that were enacted on stage…”

Location?

  • “When I undertake to write a play, my first step is to make clear to myself where it is to take place. At first glance this does not seem like an important question. A play takes place in London or Berlin, a mountainous region or a battlefield, wherever the action demands. But this is not quite accurate. A play takes place on a stage that must represent London, or a mountainous region or a battlefield”.

  • “Stage practitioners remembered the fact that no matter how detailed, how convincingly lifelike a stage set may be, the dramatic place is not the stage, it has to be brought into being by the performance (i.e. it is in the mind). A word, and we are in Venice; a word, and we are in the Tower. The audience’s imagination needs only slight support. The stage set wants to suggest, signify, intensify, not describe. It has become transparent, dematerialized. But the dramatic place represented by the sets can also be dematerialized.” (Pg 27)

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E.g.

  • Wilder’s “Our Town”.

  • Not many props. etc.

  • He believes that “Tragedy overcomes distance” (catharsis) while “Comedy creates distance”.

  • So therefore maybe he takes recourse to “Tragi-comedy”.

Durrenmatt’s views

  • When ‘The Visit’ was written, the postwar world was at a precarious stage;

  • Every town could be a Guellen.

  • Durrenmatt wrote that in the modern world, "we no longer find tragic heroes, but only tragedies staged by world butchers and carried out by meat-grinding machines...”

  • “… power today is only minimally visible, since like an iceberg the largest ...

This is a preview of the whole essay