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Our world has led us to the grotesque just as to the atomic bomb. [...] Indeed, the grotesque is only an ostensible expression, a demonstrable paradox, the form of something formless, the face of a faceless world; and just as thinking no longer seems to get along without the concept of the paradox, so art exists side by side with the world, as the world exists side by side with the atomic bomb: from fear of it. But tragedy is still possible, even though pure tragedy is no longer possible. We can glean the tragic from comedy, present it as a horrifying moment, a yawning abyss, just as there are many tragic results in Shakespeare’s comedies, from which tragedies arise.
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—FRIEDRICH DÜRRENMATT (1921–1999), “PROBLEMS OF THE THEATER,” (ZÜRICH, 1955), TRANSLATED BY EDWARD DILLER
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A drama (that is, for Dürrenmatt, the theatre’s potential and its duty) should disturb the spectator and provoke questions in him. Not questions about the play, but about himself, his own morality.
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—URS JENNY, DÜRRENMATT: A STUDY OF HIS PLAYS (1979)
In Dürrenmatt’s play there “is certainly the underlying
awareness that in the last thirty years country after country has been gripped by a wave of torture. Every time, people are tortured and killed in the name of justice and the highest ideals. And every time the people of Güllen accept it.
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—JAN KOTT, “HOW MUCH DOES A NEW PAIR OF YELLOW SHOES COST?” (1958)
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the son of a pastor, was born in the small village of Konolfingen, Switzerland, in 1921, and came of age in Bern and Zürich. A lifelong nonconformist, he skipped school to read in cafés, got kicked out of art school for not following the rules, and abandoned his dissertation in philosophy to write his first play. A prolific author, Dürrenmatt also wrote anti-fascist cabaret sketches, radio dramas, detective stories, novels, essays, speeches, and more than twenty additional works for the stage. But he is best-known for his tragicomedy, The Visit, which has seen productions and adaptations around the world. Dürrenmatt became increasingly politically active as he aged, particularly as an outspoken critic of his home country. Restless to the last, he eventually rebelled against the theatre as well, disowning it as a medium in the epilogue to his final play and devoting himself to prose for the remaining decade of his life. He died in 1990. —LAUREN DUBOWSKI, PRODUCTION DRAMATURG