Dürrenmatt’s Drama
Introduction
by Kenneth J. Northcott
Essays on DürrenmattDürrenmatt’s Drama
by Kenneth J. Northcott
Dürrenmatt’s Fiction
by Theodore Ziolkowski
Dürrenmatt’s Essays
by Brian Evenson
Friedrich Dürrenmatt is arguably one of the most important European dramatists to write since the Second World War. That he has been largely neglected in the English-speaking world in recent years (except for productions of The Visit) reflects a regrettable insularity on the part of the theatrical world of the United States in particular, the redress of which is one of the aims of this volume. In doing this it is also important to bear in mind that Dürrenmatt's dramatic oeuvre is only a part of his creative work, which includes fiction, political writings, philosophy, and—importantly though little known outside of Switzerland—a very considerable output of works in the visual arts. Therefore, before considering the dramaturgical views and the political and philosophical substance that underlie Dürrenmatt's dramatic works, let us first take a brief look at the man himself and the environment that nurtured his outlook on the world.
Dürrenmatt was born in 1921 in Konolfingen, a small town about thirteen miles from Bern in Switzerland. For Dürrenmatt, Switzerland and things Swiss have a very specific significance and one that he universalizes in much of his dramatic writing. His relationship to his native land is, in a very important and fundamental sense, ambivalent. He loved the physical attributes of the land and the landscape, and clearly the peace of the countryside was important to him, but he was at odds with the narrow-minded mentality of the Swiss people and the political organization and climate of the Swiss nation, which at one point he characterized as claustrophobic. His depiction of the bureaucracy of a small state in Hercules and the Augean Stables is a vivid lampoon of the problems of dealing with the Swiss bureaucracy. Yet, at the same time, he felt that his situation as the citizen of a small, ostensibly neutral state—although (rightly, as it has transpired) he did not feel that the Swiss had been truly neutral in the Second World War—he was in a position to observe, analyze, and criticize the events of the larger world that surrounded him and his native land. This critical analysis of global politics was especially directed at the two superpowers, the United States and the USSR, during the days when the cold war was at its height: views that today in hindsight still seem very percipient and which contain lasting and important universal truths about the political systems at work in the world. His situation in Switzerland also gave him an insight into the hypocrisy and material self-interest that are endemic in politics and political systems.
His intellectual background and training also ensured a varied approach to his depiction of life. Born the son of a pastor, Dürrenmatt made an early study of philosophy at the university, and in December 1943 he was on the point of transferring from the University of Zürich to the University of Bern—where he intended to write a doctoral dissertation on "Kierkegaard and the Tragic"—when he suddenly decided to turn to writing as a career. This decision was perhaps prompted by the chance sight of a memorial to Georg Büchner while Dürrenmatt was walking through Zürich. Büchner, who died in Zürich in 1837 at the age of twenty-six, was the author of the play Woyzeck, whose development of the theme of the antihero characterizes so much modern drama and fictional writing. Dürrenmatt says that Woyzeck had always exerted a tremendous influence upon his writing, and Dürrenmatt himself actually made a redaction of the play (which presents many textual problems). However, although he gave up his formal philosophical studies at this young age, his interest in and knowledge of philosophy continued to play a significant role in his work for the rest of his life.
Dürrenmatt never regarded his plays as finished works but was constantly revising them both in production and on the printed page until 1970, when he completed Achterloo, a mammoth synoptic historical drama, after which he gave up writing plays and confined his theatrical activity to direction and to the revision of his own plays. For just as he regarded life as being in a constant state of flux, so he saw the theater as a reflection of life, ever-changing, never fixed.
Although Dürrenmatt could never be regarded as a formal dramatic theorist of the sort represented by, for instance, Lessing—whom he greatly admired—he has nevertheless left behind a large body of writing about the theater, some of which he wrote in conjunction with his second wife, actress and documentary filmmaker Charlotte Kerr. It may seem paradoxical that, although he was no formal theorist, he should have written so much on the theater and on the theory of productions and staging, but, as I said above, the theater was never static for Dürrenmatt, and what he may see as essential at one moment may be changed radically the next. However, beginning in 1954 in his early essay on "Theater Problems" there are certain fundamental ideas about the writing and staging of plays that remain constant throughout his works. These ideas are developed and deepened in the later work Rollenspiele, in which his second wife keeps a record of a long discussion, extending over more than two years, about a fictive production of Achterloo,. The elements of his work—content, dramatic form, and, most important for him, theatricality—all have to be considered separately as parts of a greater whole, and it was especially the last of these elements that engaged Dürrenmatt after he had ceased writing plays.
What can be said as a generalization about Dürrenmatt's dramatic oeuvre is that, from a dramaturgical point of view, it defies any sort of facile pigeonholing. He himself firmly denies that he belongs to any particular school of dramatic composition: there are elements of the absurd, classical tragedy, and even realism in his works. He says in 1954 that he is not "an existentialist, a nihilist, expressionist or ironist," and had he been writing later on he might well have added "absurdist" to the list. For him the stage is not a place for the working out of theories but a place for experiment, for developing the poetry and essence of the theater. Of course, his characters express opinions, and important ones—he does not, he says, "like writing about fools"—but, unlike many of his predecessors in the German-speaking theatrical tradition, he does not work out a theory of the drama and then write plays to fit it.
This is certainly not to suggest that he is not familiar with the range of dramatic theories from Aristotle to modern times, but for him theory must follow practice, not vice versa. For example, he makes the telling point that it is Greek tragedy that makes the unities possible, not the other way round. Greek tragedy does not require exposition, he says, because the myths upon which the dramatic action is based are the familiar property of the Athenian audience, but this is not true of twentieth-century European drama, where although there is a commonality of experience there is virtually no sharing of a common subject matter, thus making it impossible for the ideal of precision that the unities represent to be achieved in our own time. There are exceptions—Kleist's Broken Jug is an outstanding one—but just because the Aristotelian unities, though perhaps desirable, cannot practically be realized by the modern dramatist, this is no reason for accepting, at the other extreme, Brecht's notion that the theater exists for didactic purposes. Dürrenmatt certainly did not regard himself as being in the Brechtian tradition, though Brecht was a playwright with whom he was frequently compared in the early days. True, there are certain "Brechtian" devices in his plays, but he uses them with a quite different intent. He believed that the theater should serve as a mirror, and, as he rightly says, Brecht is a successful dramatist because the poet Brecht wins out over the polemicist, and in the process the original intent of the drama becomes lost. Nor can he accept the Brechtian idea of the "V" or alienation effect, the demand that the actor constantly remind the audience that they are watching a play—a point of view totally at odds with Dürrenmatt's idea of the theater. "Theater is theater," says Dürrenmatt; "to act as if the audience member believes that theater is reality and that he must be deprived of this belief, is something that I do not understand." Theater, for Dürrenmatt, is its own reality, a theatrical reality, a stage reality that is created by the actor, the props, the decor all of the elements that contribute to the whole of that reality. What the audience does with this reality and what the dramatist does with it are two different, though complementary, things.
Dürrenmatt believes not only that there are no dramatic heroes today—that, indeed, in modern society the dramatic hero has become an impossibility—but also that democracy has no need of, nor any place for, real heroes. Even though the media will try to elevate athletes, winners of minor military actions, or firemen who rescue someone from a burning building into momentary heroes, their life as hero is a short one, and for this reason he calls all but one of his plays "comedies." But "comedy" for Dürrenmatt is a broad term: in comedy the shortcomings of the individual are revealed and are not necessarily treated as "comic." In "Theater Problems" he says on this point, "But the tragic is still possible even if pure tragedy is not"—and here the essential point is that the tragic flaw has taken on a new form in modern society: it is society, not fate, that dooms the protagonist. "We can," he says, "achieve the tragic out of comedy. We can bring it forth as an enlightening moment, as an abyss that suddenly opens; indeed many of Shakespeare's tragedies are really comedies out of which the tragic arises." Again and again in his works this is the central point. Tragedy, he believes, "overcomes aesthetic distance," whereas comedy creates it. The only one of his plays that he does not call a comedy—even his version of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus is a comedy—is The Visit, and this he calls a tragicomedy, a term to which we will return. Tragedy, he tells us in another place, generally deals with history, whereas comedy treats the present day, though here again he recognizes some exceptions, notably Lessing's Emilia Galotti, a play that he directed. The play is a bourgeois tragedy in which a father is forced to murder his daughter in order to save her from seduction by a petty princeling, and it places the emphasis on the fate of the daughter in the relationship to the prince rather than on the weakness of the princeling's character. One of Dürrenmatt's favorite points of reference for this distinction between tragedy and comedy in classical literature is Aristophanes' The Birds, which he, in company with some other scholars, sees as a satirical treatment of Athenian imperialistic aims and especially of Alcibiades' lack of success in, and recall from, Sicily. Furthermore, in comedy there is no real closure: we are often left with the disturbing sense that nothing has really been solved, that there is no immediately uncomfortable but, in the long run, comfortable, catharsis. In this sense, though Dürrenmatt would probably violently disagree, he does come close to the dramaturgical outlook of Bertolt Brecht, who saw the theater, at least in part, as a stimulus to action, but perhaps the real comparison should be with works of Ionesco, Beckett, and Pinter.
In his work, then, we do find elements of the theater of the absurd, of German classical tragedy, of Greek classical tragedy, and of high comedy, and these may all appear in a single work (notably so in The Visit). That the themes that recur in his dramas are familiar from other aspects of his work is of course apparent. Justice and freedom, evasion of responsibility, guilt by passivity, greed and political decay, the contrast between the small state and the large state are all prominent aspects of what Dürrenmatt calls the dramaturgy of life. His abiding conviction that justice and freedom cannot exist side by side in any human society informs much of what he writes. This is the ground bass of his view of the world during the cold war, and we can still see the truth of it even in the post-cold war era that Dürrenmatt never really got to know. Communism offers justice without freedom; Western plutocratic "democracy" offers freedom without justice. In none of his plays is this more clearly developed than in The Visit and The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi.
Central also to Dürrenmatt's dramaturgical views is the idea that the theater cannot exist without exaggeration. There is no place for realism and naturalism in his treatment of dramatic situations, neither in the staging nor in the vocabulary of the piece. If we think of the settings of Hercules; or of the names Loby, Roby, and Toby and the continuing play upon them in The Visit; or the sum of artificial limbs that make up Claire's body in the same play; or even the series of murders in The Physicists, we begin to get some idea of what Dürrenmatt is trying to achieve dramatically and what his sense of exaggeration and the effect of exaggeration is. However, within this exaggeration the dramatist must choose his subject with great care. In the area of staging and decor in general we are made aware of the impact of Dürrenmatt's concern with the visual arts. His stage directions are long and precise, especially in their directions as to the minimalist scenery, which Dürrenmatt saw as essential to his productions; with few exceptions, however, they are not disquisitions on or suggestions about the characters or the dramatic situation, as they are, for instance, in Shaw's work.
Dürrenmatt's best-known play in the English-speaking world is without doubt The Visit. There is also a 1964 film version of the work, but this has been radically changed in best Hollywood style by giving it a happy ending. This change was made after Dürrenmatt had sold the rights, and when he learned of it he said, "I cannot be forced to go and see it"—and he did not. The play was first produced in 1956 and has remained in the repertory ever since. As mentioned above, this is the one of his plays that Dürrenmatt calls a "tragicomedy," which suggests that he views Ill, the leading male protagonist—one hesitates to call him "the hero"—as a tragic figure who is killed by fate, but a fate constructed by fatal human flaws—especially greed—and not a divine "classical" fate. The action of the play takes place in the small fictitious Swiss cathedral town of Güllen—the name means "liquid manure" in the Swiss dialect. When the play opens we face a town in the midst of a deep economic depression, with rampant unemployment and with all of its industry shut down. The opening scene takes place at the railway station, where a group of the local unemployed watch the famous express trains flash through the station at which in happier days they used to stop. They await the visit of Claire Zachanassian (the names Zaharoff, the famous arms dealer of the early part of the century; Onassis, the ship owner; and Gulbenkian, the oil magnate, all resonate in this one name), who was driven from the town many years before with her unborn child, which was fathered by Ill. She is the fateful figure—the wealthiest person in the world—who has come to revenge herself upon her faithless seducer, a small shopkeeper and would-be mayor of the town. The actual plot itself is relatively simple, but Dürrenmatt rapidly establishes certain dramatic themes that are recurrent in his works—first and foremost the idea of justice. Claire has returned to buy justice, to bribe the town into giving her what she sees as the justice that is owing to her. Thus, what is in effect a sordid tale of seduction and self-interest on the part of Ill is magnified into a theatrical reality of unmanageable proportions. But while this exaggeration is growing and we are witnessing the moral collapse of society, we are forced to share in the individual's disgrace, which along with her exile from the town led her into a life of prostitution in Hamburg, a life from which she was "rescued" by a series of extremely wealthy husbands. It is Claire who has ruined the town, but only in order to ruin Ill, for she has cynically gauged the greed of the inhabitants, whose thin veneer of morality is quickly stripped away in the face of material, consumerist temptations. The particular has become the general, for we are forced to face our own consciences and are left to wonder what our reactions would be in the same circumstances. The answer is left open: Ill's death is not a "closure" but rather an invitation to question our own selves.
The threat that hangs over Ill hangs over us all, and this communal fatal guilt makes up the "tragi" part of the tragicomedy. Thus, simple though the plot is, the play itself becomes highly complex in the variety of themes with which it deals. Claire herself is a compilation of prostheses, the result of accidents that have befallen her, so that she is scarcely more than an artificially constructed or reconstructed human being. Fawned upon by her entourage of murderers—purchased from death row in Sing Sing—perjurers, and a dishonest judge, she dismisses one husband after another because she has always nursed the wish to be married in the cathedral of Güllen. Her pet is a panther, in memory of her pet name for Ill in their youth. The whole entourage is a grim comedy, far removed from human reality but tightly woven into the theatrical reality of the piece, which, as Dürrenmatt insists, must not be played with heavy-handed realism, for the comedic values—for example, the linguistic games mentioned above—must be heightened in order to make the final "tragic" ending the more powerful. Indeed, the exaggeratedly grotesque nature of the whole play, with its reiteration of implied threats—the appearance of the coffin and the wreaths, the escape of the panther, the sinister appearance of the eunuchs and the gangsters—calls forth in the audience the sort of angst with which we are familiar from the works of Beckett and Pinter. The ultimate irony of the piece is, of course, that the original petty reason for Ill's desertion of Claire—his decision to marry the shopkeeper's daughter for a small material gain—is now mirrored in the unanimous rejection of Ill by the whole population of the town. Finally, then, revenge is visited upon Ill, but although in a sense Claire can be said to be victorious, on the road to that victory she too has lost all her humanity and has become a physical, moral, and spiritual wreck.