Handke Plays: 1

Winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Peter Handke's work is amongst the most strikingly original of all post-war European writing. This collected plays volume features six plays, translated into English, from his staged work in the 1960s/70s by Michael Roloff and Karl Weber. With an introduction by Tom Kuhn and chronology of Handke's life and work, the collection also includes notes by the author on the plays themselves and a written manifesto.

Offending the Audience (1966) is described as "a dissection of our expectations about what ought to happen in the theatre." It was originally conceived not as a play, but as a polemical essay about the theatre and a confrontation with each and every one of the conventions of which audiences have been accustomed to.

Self-Accusation (1968) is "a cunning and ironic attack on bureaucratic moral guilt" (Observer). Written as the first of three short plays, it is an investigation of language and the forms of theatre designed to serve as 'autonomous prologues' to the old plays - as a means to sensitise the audience and to make them aware.

Kaspar (1968) is based on the true story of Kaspar Hauser, a sixteen year old boy who appeared from nowhere in Nuremberg in 1828 and who had to be taught to speak from scratch. Handke's play is a downright attack on the way language is used by a corrupt society to depersonalise the individual.

My Foot My Tutor (1969) is a mime for two actors - "Handke has here written an hour-long play without words that may at first look like a piece of audience-provocation but that finishes up as sheer theatrical poetry" (Guardian).

The Ride Across Lake Constance (1970) follows a group of characters (known only by the names of the actors who perform the parts) who talk and play games together and skate over the thin ice that separates them from unspoken danger. "Intensely theatrical...an author for whom playwriting seems akin to tightrope walking" (The Times).

They Are Dying Out (1973) puts the pillars of the bourgeoisie under the microscope to reveal an alien race, suffocated by rationality, unable to cope with untamed subjective impulses and shows an "uncanny knack for making the familiar seem strange" (Plays and Players).