The Games Dürrenmatt Plays

The Games Diirrenmatt Plays GABRIELE SCOTT ROBINSON • FRIEDRICH OURRENMATT SEES his art as playing a game with reality. He plays with characters, situations and ideas, manoeuvering them as in a game of chess. "The great art for me is the game, the production of a reality."! In order to be assured of a measure of order and control in practising this high art of the game, Diirrenmatt needs distance between himself and his subject matter. Thus he tries to preserve in his work a distance from his personal beliefs and doubts, maintaining that "the case of the world" is invariably more interesting than "the case Diirrenmatt." Diirrenmatt once compared his work to that of the mathematician, since he creates a hypothetical world rather than recreating the existing one. The beginning of a Diirrenmatt play is the hypothetical case, the "Einfall" (original idea, inspiration); for him this comes always as a deviation from the normal and the everyday. He then plays with this case, creating conflicts from it and imagining different solutions; from this emerges his "model of the world," which he likes to see as a super-reality with universal significance. Diirrenmatt's models are really fables. Der Blinde (The Blind Man), Ein Engel kommt nach Babylon (An Angel Comes to Babylon), Die Panne (The Breakdown, also translated as Traps), Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit), Die Physiker (The Physicists) and the others present fabulous versions oflife; in Portriit eines Planeten (Portrait ofa Planet) he has compressed the entire history of man into the space of a play. Most of his works are fables ofjustice, with their constantly recurring hangmen, judges and condemned men. Invariably Diirrenmatt paints a distorted and grotesque picture. Plot, characters, motivation and theme are all simplified, made transpar325 326 GABRIELE SCOTT ROBINSON ent and treated in a grotesquely stylised manner. It might be described as life reflected in the eyeglass of a drunk, as Diirrenmatt says ofjustice in The Breakdown. This is more than a manner of presentation, for Diirrenmatt believes that the truth is revealed most clearly by deviations from it. "The grotesque is one of the great possibilities of being precise."2 Thus, if one wishes to maintain the mathematical parallel, what Diirrenmatt presents is the mathematics of the irrational. Diirrenmatt's inclination towards hypothetical models can be seen as a rationalisation of his natural tendency to let his fantasy reign. He loves nothing more than to conjure with the stage ("mit der Biihne zu zaubern," Theater, p. 189), and sees the theatre as a "matter of the creative joy of life, the immediate life force" (Theater, p. 189). He wants to exercise to the fullest his joy in the game of opposing contradictory ideas and situations, going to dialectical as well as theatrical extremes, without being checked by the boundaries of probability, psychology or realism. His plays, even at their most serious and moral, are holidays of the imagination . Like his bishop in the early poetic play Es steht geschrieben (It Is Written) Diirrenmatt observes "the doings of men a little detached from earthly incumbrances, in a light . . . in which lines appear more distinctly ... and shapes stand out clearly against their background."3 At the same time Diirrenmatt's game possesses a deeper significance; for he believes that playing with the world is the only way for a dramatist to capture a corner of reality: "Every play's aim is to play with the world. And so, for me, theatre isn't reality, it's playing with reality , transforming it into theatre. I don't believe reality in itself is ever comprehensible, only its metamorphoses."4 Diirrenmatt's games comprise some of the greatest problems of our time: justice, guilt, freedom, survival and - self-styled lapsed Protestant that he is - the possibility of grace. Diirrenmatt's grotesque comedy is meant to present the world of modern man and, as he remarks, "Only comedy can deal with us" (Theater, p. 122). Like their creator Diirrenmatt's heroes play with the world. Romulus , Mobius and the Bastard in Konig Johann (King John) deliberately playa part, even if their intentions are serious and they wish to bring justice to mankind. They may act like buffoons...