This Is About You

...Beckett for the isolated head tortured by its self-consciousness...

...They compelled you to see something of yourself in a heroic figure brought low or in a denizen of the even lower depths...

...The lines, uttered by four undifferentiated "speakers," have a cold, dry, off-handed, repetitious flavor: "Your thoughts are free...

...Offending is a result, but hardly the result Handke intends...

...The purpose of the abuse is not to arouse your indignation but to remind you more forcefully than before that you are the subject matter of the script...

...In places the play becomes impossible to read continuously...

...And from compliments to a warm rapprochement—this conjuring-act of a playlet closes by calling you "brothers and sisters," "comrades," and "fellow human beings...

...It hypnotizes you while it alerts you...

...playing a collective role and still trying to maintain your individual responsiveness...

...That you are breathing...

...Perhaps that somebody else was "goats and monkeys.'" Or perhaps he crucified himself by talking...

...So are you...

...The Speakers thank you, give you a courteous good-night, then let go of the other end of the imaginary bond at the moment you could practically feel it in your hands and hearts...

...Ionesco with Wittgenstein...

...Self-conscious...

...a disciple of Jerzy Grotow-ski...

...He squandered himself on defying day-by-day regulations...

...However, "we will mean no one in particular," say the Speakers...

...Your recognition of it is not cathartic, not refreshing, definitely not ennobling...

...The occasion is live...

...You see us speaking and you hear us speaking...

...to induce you to celebrate...

...Barba's parable defined a noble savage corrupted by knowledge and social custom...

...Is that "like" really necessary...

...When he has wrung the last milligram of meaning out of it by enunciating it with different stresses, the play proper begins...

...As it happens, you will not be abused until nearly the end of the play...

...Prove it...

...While he mimes the tricky business of learning about objects and words, until he can take over the speaking from the Prompters, and become the Prompters, his Diippelganger mock and heckle him...

...But this matters little...

...You were assailed, laughed at, mollified...

...Between times he practices his one sentence...

...Kaspar masters the style of public speaking that says nothing, ventures into poetry, goes on into nonsense verse of the kind composed by computers and computerish poets, and ends up by repeating Othello's strange exclamation to Lodovico, "Goats and monkeys...

...Kaspar is illiterate and next to being dumb...

...Does he have to speak advertising grammar too...

...No doubt playwrights always did this...

...You are beginning to breathe in one and the same rhythm in which we are speaking...

...A few years later he was killed, or killed himself...

...You were warned in advance...

...Critics will now be asking what are Handke's theatrical latitude and longitude, whether he is "engaged" or "solipsistic," an optimist or a pessimist, and who are his (fateful, baneful word) "influences...

...You reached Shakespearean heights...

...Something has come to stubborn life...

...or Punch of Punch-and-Judy fame...

...He writes plays about you...

...Brecht for the "making aware...

...Two pages can carry a generous range of scattershot insults...

...When the evening is done you will disperse as though dismissed by the same destiny...

...If so, I foresee audiences rising in unison and going off their collective rocker...

...The popular notion that you can identify with a character takes no account of your circumstances in that cage of a seat: the intrusive elbow of the next guy (the exploring elbow if you are a girl), the hyperactive central heating, the privilege of seeing and not being seen...

...Handke is nothing if not thorough...

...We will only create an acoustic pattern...

...He will be able to laugh off the desperate attributions...

...You won't have to feel offended...

...The quasi-philosophical johnnies will try to smother him as they have tried to smother Beckett with Descartes...

...This is not quite right...

...You will never again come together as this assembly...

...goes under the English title of Offending the Audience...

...I's" life, such as it is, tells us that he does not know whether he made himself into a person or was shaped by the rest of the world...

...you hemorrhoid sufferers") and worse...

...the name (with a K) has a passing reference to Kasperle...

...Aware that your eyelids keep flickering...

...The miming on stage will provide visual distraction...

...But in production the play will be easier to take...

...And, by now, the actor of it...

...And now, God Almighty, the actors are singling out people for personal interrogations...

...Kaspar is for real, and memorable...

...Some free will...

...By describing a bond that is being formed between the stage and auditorium, the words serve as that bond...

...Handke calls the action "speech torture...

...In its insinuating way the play is bragging that, as an event, it is unique...

...With this reassurance, the text slides into two pages of the promised name calling...

...the spectator...

...Out of them he makes theater...

...In a truth summoned up with artificial means resides the theater's power...

...But only something of yourself...

...First, you are "made aware...

...The German Publikumbeschimpfung means "abusing the public...

...The only event will be the strengthening of the bond...

...It continues by letting you understand that no exterior or fictitious events will be enacted...

...I did not become what I should have become"—a man in his own right...

...In the second Sprechstiick, entitled Self-Accusation, two actors, one male, one female, represent a single character, "I...

...He grows educated, civilized...

...He yielded to impulses and flirted with danger...

...He comes onstage and fools about with props—a table, closet doors, a broom, cushions—not one of which makes sense to him...

...learns to cope, to get by...

...Nobody ever discovered where he came from...

...The story, which has subtle affinities with Calderon's Life Is a Dream, recently did service in Denmark for Casperi-ana, an improvisation by Eugenio Barba...

...He seems, like Kaspar, to have undergone some brainwashing by metaphysicians...

...But "I" is not a "character," not even a personified humour or dominant passion...

...When exposed to this drama-that-seems-no-drama you will find it uncommonly hard not to say to yourself, "This is about me, not all of it, but enough of it...

...More Kaspar-clowns appear, and indulge in their own counterpointing antics...

...One thing is certain: A portion of Kaspar, if not all of him—his clownish, childlike, prelapsarian self—has been annihilated, and through his own collusion...

...Handke so generalizes him (her) that he (she) could be anybody...

...Besides, his techniques triumph over their own limitations (and what techniques are not limited...

...In these days when the theater is scrabbling for excuses to live, he may prove to be one of its lifelines...

...Once again, you have become the character of the play, and very much aware of yourself in that role...

...He starts out with unsure movements and only one line as his verbal property: "I want to be a person like somebody else was once...

...Handke has here abandoned the methodical writing of his early pages in favor of comprehensive listings...

...Such is the burden of his "self-accusation": "I was not what I should have been...

...At the same time, you want to preserve your own feelings and not have these fellow-strangers impinging on your judgment...

...Once more he effects your transformation from spectator to participant...

...Kaspar's resistance has gone under...

...They scrape files, knives, nails, and chalk on slate and metal...

...He overslept, pulled the safety brake of moving vehicles, crossed against the traffic, stuck posters on forbidden walls, activated alarm signals, threw pressurized cans into fires, exceeded the load-limit in elevators...

...You had control of every scene...

...A Gestalt or whatever...

...Some worthy burghers took him in hand, tamed him, named him Caspar Hauser, and taught him German...

...As he does so, the curtain pulls to and flattens the subsidiary Kaspars, and perhaps the original: the stage directions are ambiguous here...

...This is the initiation of the procedure that Handke calls "making aware...

...But before the group comes apart and you go your own road, you must be abused...

...Adamov for the debasement and crippling of a soul through social coercion...

...This second play is the obverse of the first...

...The first play translated in this book, a brief Sprechstiick or speech-piece (a word play...

...You hope so, and therefore you will not put yourself on display and try to compete with the actors...

...Strindberg with Nietzsche and Swe-denborg, Ibsen with Kierkegaard and Hegel...

...We do not know whether he came at last to resemble the "somebody else" who once was...

...Around you sit young folk doing their thing, taking part...

...But this is 1970...

...This time Handke docs not openly address you: He reinvents you and then lets you study this image of yourself as a petty criminal, a furtive sinner searching for absolution by confessing to no one in particular, a trammeled being touching your misdemeanors which are your wounds and boundaries...

...It is good to know that Peter Handke is young...

...He wants to lasso you, every one of you, and to do it by means of an outburst, a free-for-all, the equivalent of the climax in a conventional drama...

...They are Kaspar before his "fall," the part of him that resists total indoctrination...

...Treated like a child, he refused to grow up...

...system...

...They mean to prod at least a few of you out of your anonymity, your passivity, your numb solidarity...

...The third play, Kaspar, is a long one and derives from the early 19th-century story of a youth who had never learned to speak, much less read or write...

...They meticulously relate "I's" upbringing, thoughts, and emotions...

...Four voices, known as "the Prompters" (a neat idea), come over a p.a...

...If "I" is anybody he is everybody, everybody in the audience...

...Unable to attain to a poetry he could call his own (for poetry is one man's language), he expressed himself finally by rebelling, but in an unimpressive way...

...Handke's Kaspar is a clown...

...You can still make up your own mind...

...As the four-part monologue becomes less formal, more intimate, it suggests that you attended this evening at the behest of a mystical force, a group destiny...

...That you are you...

...Reviewed by Albert Bermel Playwright, translator, former theater critic of "The New Leader" You paid your money and made your choice...

...Handke not merely takes account of these conditions, he trades on them, thrives on them...

...The very monotony of the sentences, these direct statements stripped of qualifying clauses and transitional phrases, has a curious double effect...

...You will notice the odd compliment floating on the torrent of comic vilification, and it praises your skill as a performer: "You were thoroughbred actors...

...one part of you is lulled by the rhetoric of repetition while another part grows intensely receptive, jarred, nervous even...

...You are beginning to breathe in one and the same rhythm...

...It is true...

...They swivel their shoulders and pump their knees to accompany a rock trio that assaults the scene breaks with sound...

...They coax, advise, and bully him...

...Abusing is an activity...

...But it is a genuine recognition...

...You elected to become faceless and darkened among strangers, to disappear into the crowd of nonentities, to average yourself out...

...He sought expression—of gesture and behavior, as well as speech—and found that he was always stuck with a secondhand vocabulary...

...Peter Handke has a different way of unsettling audience decorum...

...The outburst sounds about as spontaneous (in English) as a plundering of the thesaurus...

...Pirandello for the out-and-out use of the theater's intrinsics...

...Is the experience of Kaspar in the playhouse more excruciating than this...

...or draw attention to your independence by being the only one to laugh out loud like a rube, or by clapping alone, or by trumpeting solo noises of disapproval...

...That your throat is dry and your palms moist...

...His dramatic logic moves forward by such tiny increments that one's mind cries out for the relief of a gap to leap, a deduction to make, a hole in the constricting tunnel of instruction...

...Can you remain private in public...

...The play's only action consists of an explication of what is going on as it is going on...

...You submit to conflicting political epithets, from "You rednecks" to "You communists," and a recital of medical plausibilities ("You cancer victims...