The play is a metaphor for Dürrenmatt’s view that the world is “something
monstrous, a riddle of misfortunes which must be accepted but before which one
must not capitulate.” It deals irreverently with two theological premises: Christian
resurrection and salvation by grace .Drunken, lecherous, mean, he displays the
range of venality possible for a human being who no longer fears any
consequences, his rage deepening the longer he is denied the release of death. The
Meteor violates conventional dramaturgy. In so doing it finds a form congruent
with its theme. It has no plot. It is not an action, but an event, a happening,
designed to reflect the monstrously paradoxical nature of life which, in
Dürrenmatt’s eyes, is brutal, blind, brief and accidental.
In discussing his dramaturgy Dürrenmatt uses the term “verschlüsselt” to describe
certain of his characters, implying they are constructions, riddles, coded messages
that have to be deciphered.
He is an existentialist at times, a Marxist at others. He is a Swiss bourgeois and a
violent Swiss revolutionary. In King John he writes as a Marxist; in The Meteor as
a Bernese Christian.
Still the interview captures something of the willful eccentricity of Dürrenmatt’s
personality as well as his dialectical approach to ideas and art. His German is
cryptic, staccato, tending to series of short clauses, or simple sentences. The
interpenetration in his thinking of Christian, Kierkegaardian, and Marxist strains is
explicit in many of his responses.
Fragmente prelegeri/interviuri
I came to believe that one can think not only in philosophy, but also on the stage.
I have done all those things an author has to do in order to feed his family: I wrote
mystery stories, cabaret pieces, radio plays, dramas for the theater, and because I
was mostly misunderstood I became famous, which means I made money.
My relationship to American literature is not very solid, simply because I seldom
read literature and I seldom go to the theater since I produce literature myself and
write and direct theater pieces myself.
we staged it not with the emphasis on spirit, but on flesh; hence we brought out the
characters, in a style that was almost comedian-like, not at all solemn, and that
made people mad. And everywhere that it was played solemnly it left the audience
unmoved.
I would say I struggle with a theological fact: the resurrection.
Christian resurrection as a subject for comedy.
Through the theater the dramatist tries to change the social reality of man.
A documentary is critical. But a documentary drama is always fiction. The first
documentary drama is The Persians by Aeschylus. I write only comedies.
K: Were you influenced by Brecht in that? What do you think of his work?
D: It is embarrassing for one playwright to talk about another.
K: I don’t want you to talk about the quality of his writing, but I want your
reaction to what he writes about.
D: Playwrighting. You see yourself in a line. You see all that has been and think it
through again.
Aristophanes I like. Shakespeare. I like to adapt Shakespeare. I did Titus
Andronicus. And after all Shakespeare never wrote an original play. I like to take
old plays and adapt them.
D: Shakespeare’s plots are sometimes weak, just clothesline to hang beautiful
verse on. I prefer tightly structured pieces
D: I also experiment with time. I speed up the clock. Shorten the hours
Is that because you are the son of a Protestant minister?
D: At the university I studied philosophy and theology. Ten semesters of
philosophy.
K: Then how did you become a playwright?
D: First I wanted to become a painter. But I didn’t paint much better than
Nyffenschwander.
K: Why comedy? Why not tragedy?
D: Because only comedy is possible in the world today.
D: In the old plays—Shakespeare, Schiller, the Greeks—the powerful are always
the tragic figures. Their power could be envisioned by the audience. But today
power is too enormous, too automatic. We cannot see it anymore. So the powerful
are the terrible clowns among men. They are anonymous, inhuman. We see them
only from a distance.
“The robe of a king is the most elevated clown costume we know.”
D: Democracy cannot take authoritarian power seriously. When we cannot have
personal responsibility, personal guilt, we cannot have tragedy.
D: Man ought to be free. But first he has to find out that he is a victim. And the
function of the theater is to show that, to show man that the only action that makes
sense is an action toward freedom.
D: No. In the comedy man sees himself on the stage. He is analyzed.
K: But not in the scientific sense.
D: No. Theater is not so serious. Theater is play, and as play it can be useful.
Dramaturgical thinking can look at the paradox, the inner tension of reality.
K: And the more paradoxically the theater presents reality the better.
D: Dramaturgical thinking is like dialectical thinking, but it does not have any
specific ideology. That is why it can show the paradox of life.
D: The political dialectic tries to teach a method. In the chess game that would be
the method by which white always wins. Dramaturgic dialectic represents the chess
game in which it doesn’t matter which side wins—the white or the black. Or even
if it ends in checkmate. Only the playing counts. The dramatic theme of the
beginning, the way the final moves work out.
D: Comedy and tragedy, they are old concepts. A comedy is funny and a tragedy is
sad. . . . These are old concepts which have long ago become useless. The theater
piece is like a soccer ball. First one side is up, then the other, depending on how
you hold it. First a play is tragic and then it’s comic. I call a piece comedy in the
old sense of Dante’s Divine Comedy: comedy is simply play and the awareness that
it is simply play, that it is not divine, that it generates a feeling of alienation: that
lies in the nature of theater itself. I call these things comedy.
D: I think dialectically and I have coined the phrase: a story is only told to the end
when it has taken the worst possible turn.
D: The contemporary problem is that man is a paradoxical being. I base that on the
fact that man is the only being which creates concepts. Man creates two types of
concepts: existential ones and logical ones. In the existential concepts he abstracts
himself from the logical ones. In the existential I am alone, I am I, and as an
individual I feel myself to be the absolute center of things. I have my life: I must
die. I can feel only myself. I cannot feel the other. Out of the general concept of
man I cannot come to myself. There I am a man among other men. There I am a
mass concept.
D: The only force which can understand the other is love. It is an expansion of the
existential concept. That is the “we.” Man expands from the self, to the friend, to
the woman. Man expands and creates what I call emotional reality or individual
reality or existential reality.
D: I regret Sartre’s existentialism because it is seeming existentialism, because he
opposes Being and Nothingness. The Nothingness doesn’t exist. Nothingness is a
pure fiction. With Nothingness you can do nothing. It is metaphysics. Null or Zero
is a real term. For example, you can have zero in the bank.
D: What I take as existential is the immediate consciousness of every man that he
exists, that he has a life, that he must die. Those are tangible evidences. The logical
evidences—what you know by logic—are deductions which man makes from
experience.
D: I would put Marxism next to the existential. Marxism, which tries to define the
reasonable man from the point of view of the general. Marxism is the attempt,
which starts from Hegel, to proceed from the general to the existential. And Marx
had an ingenious thought—to introduce an emotional “we”—the exploited class.
But this is only a beginning. Marxism never succeeded in taking out the existential.
It never accepted in its system the existential realities and problems of society.
D: It is just as naive as the faith of the western society, of the capitalistic order, that man can change the
world by a little bit of piety. What is at stake is whether or not man succeeds in being better, and not
whether he succeeds at living better. However, that statement makes sense only after I create a society
worthy of man.
D: One has to destroy metaphysics to make room for faith.
D: No. Man doesn’t shine in happiness—there he becomes content—but in the catastrophe. Jesus spoke
only to the whore and the lowly.
D: She can speak to him because she has absolutely no illusions. She represents man without any fiction.
The counterpart of Schwitter. She sees the world as it is.
D: What is essential in freedom is the freedom of the spirit. What man has to claim above all is the
freedom of the spirit. That is his right.
K: But what is the bridge, the connection between the two: freedom and justice?
D: Well, first we have to admit that politics is incapable of solving the problem. The
individual has to yield up a huge amount of freedom. We can have large houses now,
but when the world population becomes much larger we shall all have to live in
extremely small rooms. As in science we must learn to choose, among the different
methods, which apply in individual cases.
The question as to how a free society can be just is the question for the world today.
K: Freedom then, by your definition, is an existential concept: therefore an individual
problem.
D: And justice is a logical concept.
D: What is essential in freedom is the freedom of the spirit. What man has to claim
above all is the freedom of the spirit. That is his right.
K: The choice is possible.
D: Only in an existential sense. We must take steps to make society just, and we must
take such steps as only we can take, personally, in order to make ourselves free.
D: There are two kinds of love: romantic love and hard love.
K: What is hard love?
D: Love that doesn’t want to change the other person, but that permits him to be what
he is.
D: Theater is a test of whether or not democracy can function.
K: Yet when you contrast theater in the democracies in the west with theater in
Eastern Europe, you give theater in the east the advantage. At least subsidized theater.
D: For people in the east the theater is the last platform for freedom. For the Poles, for instance. I
believe the Polish theater is the strongest in the world today. The audience is an absolutely
political public which understands theater politically. A public which understands all as being
directed against the regime. There theater is revolution.
K: What of Grotowski and his Lab Theater?
D: Grotowski is different. Grotowski is not in the revolution. But the great directors
are—like Erwin Axer. In the east the state makes demands on the theater.
K: But you say that is true in the west, too.
D: That is the point, of course. The demands of the state on the theater are all alike.
The Fascists, the Communists, the Capitalists—it’s all the same.
D: Hamlet is one of my beloved pieces. Hamlet has much in common with The
Meteor. Hamlet is an intellectual. He has studied in Wittenberg and comes back and
then a ghost appears to him.
K: Wittenberg is not coincidental?
D: Hamlet is a Protestant. The spirit tells Hamlet he is his father, murdered by his
uncle. Hamlet doesn’t know whether this message from the world beyond is the truth
or phony. He drives himself to madness, not from weakness of character, but out of
his love of finding truth. He wants to act, but when he sees the murderer praying he
cannot kill him. If he does, the murdered will go to heaven while his father is in hell.
That is really very amusing when you think of it. At the end of the play all the
characters who were worrying about confession are killed—in duels, by poisoning—
and swept off to hell unshriven.
K: Do you think Hamlet is a good piece?
D: A masterpiece, but it is for a private art collection. Something you look at, but not
the intricate chess game. It is easier to stage Hamlet than The Meteor.
D: That was necessary. You cannot simply put history on the stage. It is only the raw
material. In my play I had to change the emphasis to something more contemporary.
D: To put old texts on the stage now, they have to be in relationship to the tensions of
the present.
K: You imply by that not only social and political attitudes, but form too.
D: Each piece has to find its proper artistic form. That is very important.
K: Is that why the staging of some of your plays has disappointed you?
K: On the whole, even though you say your comedies show reality, you do not intend
them to be staged realistically. Not in the literal sense.
D: English theater tends very much to naturalism. They played The Visit more
realistically than impressionistically. That is the real distinction between the German
theater and the English. Even in Milan one of the great directors put a railway track
across the stage. That was a mistaken attempt at neorealism.
K: And the Broadway production?
D: Magnificently performed, but it was too romantic, too realistic. The old woman
wasn’t vicious enough. She didn’t have a wooden leg. In my script I wanted men to
play trees. They left that out because it was too offensive, too childish. That was
wrong. For me drama is above all structure. That means I have to compose it the way
a composer structures a symphony. Shakespeare’sKing John is just a rapidly written
Elizabethan piece. It is like a good beginning in a chess game, but then there are lots
of wrong moves. There are good and bad pieces by Shakespeare. There are bad pieces
by me and good pieces. The composed pieces are very difficult to stage. The
clothesline pieces are easier. We see Hamlet with as little precision as we
see Faust. Goethe had written aFaust that is a work of genius. And that is
the Urfaust. And the entire wellknown Faust is a disaster. In my opinion there are
two great revolutionary pieces in world literature: Goethe’s Urfaust and
Büchner’s Woyzeck.
Why do you rewrite so much?
D: Because I see my pieces often and in each production one sees one’s mistakes.
When you write a play, you are like a painter when he paints. And if you step back
you see here there has to be a spot of red. You can only describe a piece when you’ve
learned from performance what’s wrong and what’s right about it. You only have a
distance from a piece when it’s performed.
