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DURRENMATT AND THE SPIRIT OF PLAY SISTER CORONA SHARP The spirit of play is as old as the human race and finds its more elaborate expression in sports. in games. and in the "work" of artists of many cultures.' A vision of the most highly developed form of play is "Das Glasperlenspiel." described in the novel by Hermann Hesse? Although few artists place their work in the exalted position of Hesse's Game. most of them share a belief in his basic assumptions. These fundamentals are the purpose of delight and the freedom from outward necessity. Some artists. such as Flaubert and Conrad. have found only agony in their work; but others. such as James. Stevenson. and Diirrenmatt. have discussed it explicitly in terms of play.' When. in the spirit of play. art aims at delight. it frequently allies itself with sanity. for laughter usually springs from the exposure of unreasonableness . But the playful spirit can also trifle with the gravity of reason. by assuming an infinitude of possibilities or a willing suspension of reason's limitations. It Can also play Seriously with ideas. types. and society. as in satire. and then the goal is delight mixed with anger. Freedom from outward necessity. the second fundamental quality of play. reveals itself in the manipulation by the artist of persons and things. space and time. The dramatist who follows the rule of the great AS IF is playing in "the world of freedom itself - of activity for its own sake. of spontaneity. of pure realization...• Presupposing the freedom of experimentation . such an artist makes his writing an open-end undertaking. aimed at delighting only those who can accept the unexpected and bizarre. Diirrenmatt is a protean dramatist who writes in this spirit of play. freely supposing. manipulating. revising his work. and confusing critics with preconceived criteria. Part I of this essay will discuss the characteristics of his spirit of playas evinced in his dramatic theory. Part H is devoted to a study of the Diirrenmatt character. the grave-merty man. who exemplifies this spirit.5 Some conclusions will then be drawn in Part HI. I The two Diirrenmatt plays best known in English-speaking circles are The Visit and The Physicists. and the textual changes made for us 64 SISTER CORONA SHARP indicate something of the cultural gap between the Swiss and the AngloSaxons . Grotesqueness was considerably mitigated for the Broadway production of The Visit (1958), while James Kirkup's translation of The Physicists (1963) omits the subtitle, "A Comedy in two Acts." Indeed, an avowed comic treatment of the hydrogen bomb would seem too repellent . But then, Diirrenmatt has said "Einen komischen Humor haben die Auslander" (Foreigners have a queer sense of humour). The clue to his strangeness is found in Diirrenmatt's cultural background , both literary and popular. Most of his acknowledged sources are writers who played with ideas or experimented with form: Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Wedekind, Nestroy, Raimund, Shaw, Wilder, and Brecht, of whom Aristophanes and Nestroy are his favourites. A Viennese actor, Johann Nestroy, wrote, between 1827 and 1862, eighty-two comedies, some of which enjoyed great success during his lifetime and are still in the repertory of the Vienna Burgtheater.6 The needs of Nestroy's comic art are supplied from the entire stock of theatrical tricks, for popular taste, unlike literary criticism, has never set up rigorous standards. Fantasy and the supernatural vie with peasant life; slapstick goes hand in hand with parody and clever wordplay, all of which achieve rollicking humour. Nestroy and his fellow playwrights were, however, prevented by censorship from openly ridiculing the court, the church, and the government. This limitation probably explains ti,e scant success of their plays beyond German-speaking lands. Nevertheless, Nestroy knew how to play with the stage and the audience, and Diirrenmatt prefers to have his plays interpreted in the light of Nestroy's comic art. In discussing his own dramatic theories, Diirrenmatt describes himself as a playmaster: "For me, the stage is not a battlefield for theories, philosophies and manifestoes, but rather an instrument whose possibilities I seek to know by playing with it."7 And: "The origin of any dramatic art is found first of...

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