Playwright

HEINER MOLLER HEINER MOLLER, PLAYWRIGHT My text had nothing to do with Alcestis. It was based on a drawing, a very amateurish drawing, of a student in Sofia, Bulgaria. She had a dream and she was drawing the dream. I was interested in this drawing because it is not a work of art. She never read one line of Sigmund Freud and doesn't know anything about it, but it had a very clear and very compelling psychoanalytical surface. I wanted to do something with this drawing, but didn't know what. And then I wrote the text. When Bob asked me for a prologue to his Alcestis production I just gave him this text. It can be used as a prologue. It's okay. I had the drawing for two or three years, and one day I began just to write what I saw. There are two birds in the drawing. One bird in a tree, and a skeleton of another one, inside the house. It's all in the drawing. I recognized Alcestis when the text was finished. It was just the idea of this girl coming from underground, and coming back from the world of the dead. When I was finished with the text I made the note about Hitchcock's The Birds, I tried to make it interesting or confusing for directors. I like to confuse them. A danger always, especially in German theatre, in European theatre, is that the director has a clear concept and then he breaks the text, you know, and kills the play with his concept. And so I always try to confuse them. 95 MOLLER DESCRIPTION OF A PICTURE is one step further after DESPOILED SHORE. I began to take notes in the early 70s, but actually wrote it in '85. The English title I wanted is EXPLOSION OF A MEMORY, and this is what I tried to create, the explosion of a memory. It has very much private material In it, too, for sure. I didn't have a plan or concept, from one sentence to another. In the beginning I could just rely on the drawing. The first two pages I was trying to tell what I saw in this drawing, and then there were points when I didn't know how to continue. I remember one point when there was no way out, I didn't know what to write next, so I just drank a lot of scotch, and then I wrote something down without thinking. Next day I saw it was okay. I think the text is exploding the Image. It begins with the image, and the Image explodes. At the end there is no image any more. The whole problem is that all my texts are made of words and not of ideas. Ideas are in them maybe, but they are secondary. First the words, the words are vehicles for ideas. There is one point that I'm really Interested in, the question of what is after death. Is there something? Maybe that's just a matter of getting old and nothing else. So I tried to write a text about the world on the other side of death, and that's the main impulse. I think it's just a democratic attitude because the dead ones are the majority. There are many more dead people 96 than living ones, and you have to write for a majority. This is socialist realism. This rock of a text can be fragmented like molecules breaking apart, but even In the end it can't be destroyed. We start out with a man on tape sounding like a Shakespearean actor, and then add another voice-Chris Moore sounding very neutral, androgynous-a simple way of speaking; then Chris Knowles, who erases some of the words, putting holes In the text; then we have HarryMurphy sounding likea newscaster; the voiceofa child then speaks some of the text; and finally the ghostlike voice of Death. So the Prologue sets up these different ways of speaking, of thinking about language,ofpresenting ideas through words that anticipate the situation that is to follow. Crystal-clear, it's gripping, transparent. It's likea...