The visit of an Old Lady

We started rehearsing for a new play yesterday. As soon as the other one was "buried", it was time to start a new one. It is sometimes a little difficult to leave a play behind, as you strangely attach to your role and people you're working with. Sometimes you're in a play so deeply it takes time to get rid of it psychologically. So, a new, totally different kind of a play is always a very good thing, a change to "reborn" again!
So now it's time for Friedrich Durrenmatt's "Der Besuch der alten Dame", "The visit of an Old Lady." I'll write more and tell how the play will find it's course, and will definitely enclose some photos from the beginning to the end.

Here's some more information about the play itself:

"Feeling for humanity, gentlemen, is cut for the purse of an ordinary millionaire; with financial resources like mine you can afford a new world order."

Der Besuch der alten Dame ("The Visit of the Old Lady") premiered in Zurich in 1956, when Durrenmatt was 35. It was such a success that productions sprang up in England and America over the next two years.
Durrenmatt called this story "A Tragic Comedy." More than any other of his plays, this story of an old lady who returns home to wreak an exact and merciless vengeance on her former lover intimately joins comedy and tragedy to support each other in nearly every scene.

The play really has three major characters: the old lady, Claire Zachanassian; her former lover and object of her ruthless justice, Alfred lll; and the people of the town of Gullen, who make up a kind of composite representation of society itself. Through these characters, Durrenmatt is able to give the audience a darkly comic, breathless, and in the end, unanswerable debate about the nature of justice, redemption and community.

Claire is a hodgepodge of patched-together artificial limbs, held together only by her hate. Since her betrayal at the hands of lll and the people of Gullen, she has spent her life in a single-minded vengeance. Her justice is god-like. Across all of Europe, she pursues the two men who lied about her in court like a fury; they are castrated and made her slaves. Durrenmatt compares her to an ancient idol. She is like the statue of Justice - eternal, something out of myth. When the townspeople first refuse her offer of a billion marks for the life of Alfred lll, she says quietly, "I'll wait," and you can imagine her waiting centuries.

Amazingly, we find ourselves cheering her on; as the play begins, she is the only character who speaks the unadorned truth. In The Visit, characters use language to hide their real intentions. As Durrenmatt writes, "Today man lives in a world which he knows less than we assume. He has lost his image and has become a victim of images." In The Visit, he puts the preconceptions that get us through day-to-day life under the microscope.

Although Durrenmatt decried symbolism ("Misunderstandings creep in, because people desperately search the hen yard of my drama for the egg of explanation which I steadfastly refuse to lay."), it is hard not to see the poverty of Europe during the Depression and the slow growth of fascism in-between the lines in The Visit. With the ashes of World War II still in their mouths, the people of Europe in the 1950's faced the growing Cold War and the shadow of the atomic bomb. The question of how a man can hold on to his ideals in the face of grinding poverty was still a strong one.

Durrenmatt wrote about the town of Gullen (meaning "excrement" in Swiss), "It is a community which slowly yields to temptation...yet this yielding must be understandable. The temptation is too great, the poverty is too bitter. (The Visit) is a malicious play, but just for that reason, it must be presented without anger and in the most humane way, with sadness yet with humor, for nothing hurts this comedy that ends tragically than brutal seriousness."

Durrenmatt uses the people of the town to show the weakness of authority, the disorder just beneath the civilization's order. When the people of Gullen begin to buy expensive items on credit, lll panics, and goes for help to his Family, the Government (the Mayor), the Law (the police chief) and the Church (the minister). He is rebuffed at every turn. Even the teacher, representing Intellectualism, sees what is happening but is too weak to fight it.

With no where to turn, lll takes responsibility for his crime. He achieves the serenity and acceptance that Durrenmatt saw as the pinnacle of human heroism. He gains stature in our eyes through this transformation. He can reject the city's offer to commit suicide; the town, too, must be made to face its responsibility. In The Visit, lll is the only character who changes and grows. Claire is sterile in everything but her need for revenge; the people of Gullen do nothing but reveal their true, rotten selves. Only lll has the epiphany of self-knowledge that Durrenmatt prized so highly.

At the end of the play, with lll dead at the town's feet and Claire's check in the Mayor's hand, "order" and "community" are restored, but now the audience knows these ideas are grotesquely false. As Peppard writes, "In the closing scene, the townspeople appear as much slaves as they did at the beginning; if at first they were victims of poverty, they are now the captives of prosperity. Only lll has found freedom, and he has attained it only by a withdrawal from the community into death."

In The Visit, Durrenmatt writes a classical tragedy for the 20th century, a modern answer to ancient questions of honor, loyalty and community.