Reflections of mortality

Max Frisch's triptychon

Michael G. Butler

pp. 147-161

in: Ian Donaldson (ed), Transformations in modern European drama, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1983

Abstract

For a writer whose international reputation rests largely on his contribution to the theatre, it is a surprising fact that Max Frisch's new work, Triptychon: Drei szenische Bilder (1978), is not only his first play for over a decade but only the second he has produced since Andorra in 1961. Such apparent reticence vis-à-vis the theatre has been frequently explained, however, by Frisch himself. For example, he put forward his previous play, Biografie (1967), as an attempt to seek a way out of a dramaturgical impasse first delineated in his "Schiller-Preisrede" of 1965. There Frisch spoke of his increasing dissatisfaction with his earlier experiments with the parable play, specifically Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1958) and Andorra — plays which followed "eine Dramaturgie der Fügung, eine Dramaturgie der Peripetie" (V, 366 — "a dramaturgy of Fate, a dramaturgy of peripeteia").[1] What concerned Frisch in the middle 1960s — no doubt under the impact of the radical debate on the nature of literature developing at that time in West Germany — was an uneasiness about the predictable nature of the didactic-parable form itself where "das Gespielte hat einen Hang zum Sinn, den das Gelebte nicht hat" (V, 368 — "What is played tends to develop a meaning which is not possessed by the lived experience").

Cited authors

Frisch Max