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Here are some extracts from a letter which Frisch sent to Lindsay Anderson, the director of the play's British premiere at the Royal Court in 1961

What cast do you have? It is a comedy where the laughter gets frozen, and this can only happen if the part of Biedermann is acted in a way that we, the audience, are forced to recognize ourselves in this fellow, that’s important. Of 75 German productions I saw only three, Zurich, Munich and Frankfurt: two of them were running wrong because Biedermann was too dull or, in one case, too small, a little coward instead of a heavy and fine bourgeois boss with a very very normal self confidence, sure that he will arrange it. After Biedermann’s meeting with the chorus, there is the point where he is no longer a harmless liar, now he sees the situation, making the invitation to the [arsonists] he is full of fear (this has to be shown otherwise he is just an idiot) and a dangerous fellow, somebody who wants to make a contract with evil, the recognized evil. Another point: please start the play very slowly, for instance if Biedermann offers the first cigar, because of embarrassment, because there stands a man who doesn’t talk, because there is a large pause. The same when he offers bread and wine; he is only embarrassed and polite, of course, a gentleman. Then, after the story with the employee, he has to go on because of his bad conscience, that is the second step. Did you see the Paris production? There it was wrong, you could not see the steps, he was a blind idiot from beginning to end. And the end: when Biedermann says his last sentence (about matches and [arsonists]) of course, he does no longer believe that, it is not stupidity, he only tries to keep his mask, trembling himself.

An entry in his diary:

August 1948: “On Writing”

“What Brecht and his Organon calls the “alienation effect”: according to this, theatrical alienation should be used to divest social practices vulnerable to change of the stamp of familiarity which now protects them from attack. Further, the audience must not identify itself with the action….”

From the royal Court theatre: Frisch had the opportunity to grow up in Switzerland and view world events from afar but his writing contained strongly political themes. Some recurring themes of his are identity, guilt, and innocent. It could be a statement on Switzerland’s lack of action in the face of Nazism. He is more subtle than Brecht, he is a moralist who invites the audience to come to the moral conclusion.

 

“I am here to ask questions, not to answer them”. Frisch continues: “As a playwright, I would consider my task completely fulfilled if I should ever succeed, in a play, in posing a question in such a way that the audience, from that moment on, could not live without an answer - without their answer, their own, which they can give themselves only with life itself”.

Max Frisch's Ideas

The theatre of imitation is a mistake (hence why he used parables to avoid it), parables do not claim to be real, but they can develop a meaning that can be applied to reality.

 

“each time something is performed it instantly turns into the present, thus achieving a false authenticity. That is, one feels it is happening now or it happened exactly like that. This is simply a theoretical error which I tracked down to this point,”

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