A Drama of Disease and Derision: The Plays of Thomas Bernhard

A Drama of Disease and Derision: The Plays of Thomas Bernhard MARTIN ESSLIN The diseased and the crippled rule the world everything is ruled by the diseased and by the crippled It is a comedy an evil humiliation Thomas Bernhard, Die MachI der Gewohnheit, Scene I' We stand towards each other in a relationship of disease the whole worJd consists of such sickness all of it undiagnosed Thomas Bernhard, Ein Festfuer Boris, First prologue' On the theatre. dear Sir, even the impossible becomes entertainment and the monstrous becomes an object of study as being improbable, and all by allusion. Thomas Bernhard, Watten) "Everybody merely talks to himself" said the Prince, "we are in an age of monologues The art of the monologue is, moreover, a much higher art than the art of conversation" he said "but monologues are just as meaningless as conversations." said the Prince, "albeit much less meaningless." Thomas Bernhard, Verstoerungt In the Gennan-speaking world, and in the whole of continental Europe, Thomas Bernhard, born in Holland of Austrian parents in 1931 (on the 10 February, the date also of Brecht's birth), is generally accepted as one of the 368 MARTIN ESSUN leading literary figures of his time, the author of a remarkable series of short stories, seven major novels and ten successful plays; yet in the Englishspeaking sphere, he is still practically unknown. One of his plays, Die Macht der Gewohnheit (The Force of Habit), has been translated, was briefly performed at the National Theatre in London in 1976, and proved a resounding failure. But apart from that, his name has hardly been mentioned. And, adntittedly, Bernhard is a strange and bewildering writer. His deep pessintism, the blackness of his humour, his predilection for a basically monologic form, both in the novel and the short story, and in the theatre, point to a kinship with Beckett; yet there are very profound differences between them as well. Bernhard is a wholly original writer whose roots might perhaps be sought in Kleist and Stifter (as the sources of the remarkable purity and directness of his style in his prose and the free vetse of his dramatic works) as well as in the German expressionist theatre, Wedekind and Strindberg, rather than in any contemporary models. By all accounts, Bernhard's childhood and youth were extremely unhappy: he seems to have been an illegitimate child, brought up by his maternal grandparents in Austria (Vienna and Salzburg) and Bavaria. From the age of fourteen , he began training as a musician, studying singing, the violin and musical theory, but his studies were interrupted by lengthy stays at various sanatoria for lung ailments. Hence perhaps his obsessive preoccupation with disease in all its forms, physical as well as mental. Although he graduated from the Salzburg Mozarteum and the Academy for Music and the Perfornting Arts in Vienna, Bernhard did not take up a musical career, but travelled widely, worked as the court-room reporter for a socialist newspaper and began to publish poetry in 1957; he wrote the libretto for a ballet-oratorio; and he had a number of short dramatic sketches performed at a rural festival in 1960. His novel Frost, a brilliantly written study of a man's mental disintegration, appeared in 1963 and immediately propelled him into fame. A second novel, Verstoerung (Disorientation), followed in 1967- His breakthrough in the theatre came in 1970, when the Hamburg SChauspielhaus scored a great success with his play Ein Fest fuer Boris (A Feast for Boris), which, apparently, he had written as early as 1967. His output, both of plays and narrative prose since then, has been abundant. As his work is practically unknown in the English-speaking world, it may be useful to precede a discussion ofhis dramatic work with brief summaries of the outlines ofhis ten full-length plays: Ein FeSlfuer Boris (1967: first perfonned 1970). An extremely rich lady, referred to only as "Die Gute" (the Good Lady), has lost both her legs in an accident in which her husband was killed. She has used herwealth to finance an asylum for legless cripples, and bas married the most repulsive and miserable among them, Boris. In the first scene, labelled...