Friedrich Durenmatt

Swiss playwright-essayist Friedrich Durenmatt (1921-1990) was first introduced to Manila audiences through his play The Visit which PETA staged in Pilipino at Fort Santiago under the direction of Cecile Guidote (now Alvarez). Its principal character was eminent lawyer Pacita de los Reyes-Phillips.

Under the auspices of the Swiss Embassy and the Goethe Institut, Durenmatt’s widow, Charlotte Kerr, will lecture on the famed author and read from The Assignment, one of his most famous valued works with much "unsurpassable" text.

Durenmatt is now ranked among the world’s leading German-speaking playwrights, and his controversial plays are often linked with the theater of the absurd. To him, the purely tragic is impossible in our grotesque times but "we can achieve the tragic through comedy". He was influenced by Brecht’s "alienation effect" which has both audience and actors keeping some distance from events and characters of the drama. By contrast, however, Brecht believes in reason and change while Durenmatt conveys a dark social vision.

Durenmatt made an impact on the international stage with The Marriage of Mr. Mississipi (1952), produced in New York as Fools Are Passing Through and starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontane. An Angel Comes to Babylon (1953) proves that power wins grace. The Visit shows his accustomed pessimism about human nature by demonstrating how money corrupts an impoverished community.

Many regard The Physicist, a comment on the morals of science in a world of unscrupulous politicians, Durenmatt’s best play. His detective novel The Pledge, filmed in 2001, was directed by Sean Penn and starred Jack Nicholson as an old homicide detective. On The Pledge, which starts as a lecture and a travel story, Durenmatt says: "You don’t try to get mixed up with the kind of reality that is always slipping through your fingers. Instead, you set up a world you can manage. That world may be perfect – who knows – but it is also a lie."

Durenmatt was well-grounded on Greek playwrights like Aristophanes, and such modern writers as Kafka, Kierkegaard and Ernst Jungen. Durenmatt thought Schiller’s idea of the tragic unworkable because it preoccupies a clear concept of the world. In the nuclear age, "we can be reached only by comedy" behind which the tragic becomes invisible.

Durenmatt’s other interests were painting and drawing.

After the death of his first wife, Lotti Geissler, he married Charlotte Kerr. Born in Frankfurt, Charlotte studied sociology and journalism at Heidelberg U. where she fell in love with the theater and acted onstage. She also produced documentaries and portraits of Billy Wilder, Melina Mercouri, among others.

She met Durenmatt in 1983 and they were married the next year after filming Portrait of a Planet. She became co-author and critical partner in significant phases of Durenmatt’s work.