Friedrich Durrenmatt is considered one of the most significant playwrights of our time. During the years of the Cold War, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. In this ALTA National Translation Award-winning new translation of what many critics consider his finest play, Joel Agee gives a fresh lease to a classic of twentieth-century theater. Durrenmatt once wrote of himself: "I can best be understood if one grasps grotesqueness," and The Visit is a consummate, alarming Durrenmatt blend of hilarity, horror, and vertigo. The play takes place "somewhere in Central Europe" and tells of an elderly millionairess who, merely on the promise of her millions, swiftly turns a depressed area into a boom town. But the condition attached to her largesse, which the locals learn of only after they are enmeshed, is murder. Durrenmatt has fashioned a macabre and entertaining parable that is a scathing indictment of the power of greed and confronts the perennial questions of honor, loyalty, and community.

The scene is a madhouse and the focus is on three inmates who are nuclear physicists. One thinks he is Newton and another, Einstein. The third has visitations from Solomon. They appear to be nice, likeable lunatics, but nothing is as simple as it seems. Are they really mad? Or are they playing some murderous game with the world as the stake? Who is earnest and who is the spy? Gradually we learn that each has been led down the path to moral destruction, past the signposts of truth, the purity of science, and personal responsibility. The asylum to which their paths have led them seems much saner than the mad world they've left behind.4 women, 16 men

Drama

Friedrich Durrenmatt, adapted by Maurice Valency

Characters: 25 male, 5 female, 2 children

Drop and wing; frags.

The Lunts chose this unforgettable play for their swan song. A wealthy woman returns to her debt ridden home town and offers a sum greater than they have ever imagined to help out. But there is a condition: she wants the life of a villager who years ago had caused her to be expelled from town in disgrace. Ringing denial of this absurd demand is followed by the gradual corruption of everyone in town. He is murdered and money is passed over his body to the town. The lady leaves with a fantastic entourage and with the coffin of her old lover. Voted best foreign play of the year by N.Y. Drama Critics Circle. "Stinging.... [with] astonishing power." N.Y. Herald Tribune. "A devastating drama." N.Y. Times.

The full German text of Durrenmatt's play is accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context.

A genre-bending mystery recalling the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and anticipating the postmodern fictions of Paul Auster and other contemporary neo-noir novelists. Inspector Barlach forgoes the arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing another, more elusive criminal. This is a thriller that brings existential philosophy and the detective genre into dazzling convergence

The full German text of Durrenmatt's play is accompanied by German-English vocabulary. Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its social and historical context."

In the town of Slurry, New York, post-war recession has bitten. Claire Zachanassian, improbably beautiful and impenetrably terrifying, returns to her hometown as the world's richest woman. The locals hope her arrival signals a change in their fortunes, but they soon realise that prosperity will only come at a terrible price... Friedrich Durrenmatt's visionary revenge play, one of the great achievements of modern German-language theatre, has been transported to mid-twentieth-century America by the acclaimed playwright Tony Kushner. This revelatory new adaptation of The Visit opened in the Olivier auditorium of the National Theatre, London, in February 2020, directed by Jeremy Herrin, and starring Lesley Manville and Hugo Weaving.

The Physicists is a provocative and darkly comic satire about life in modern times, by one of Europe's foremost dramatists and the author of the internationally celebrated The Visit. The world's greatest physicist, Johann Wilhelm Moebius, is in a madhouse, haunted by recurring visions of King Solomon. He is kept company by two other equally deluded scientists: one who thinks he is Einstein, the other who believes he is Newton. It soon becomes evident, however, that these three are not as harmlessly lunatic as they appear. Are they, in fact, really mad? Or are they playing some murderous game with the world as the stake? For Moebius has uncovered the mystery of the universe--and therefore the key to its destruction--and Einstein and Newton are vying for this secret that would enable them to rule the Earth. Added to this treacherous combination is the world-renowned psychiatrist in charge, the hunchbacked Mathilde von Zahnd, who has some diabolical plans of her own. With wry, penetrating humor, The Physicists probes beneath the surface of modern existence and, like Marat/Sade, questions whether it is the mad who are the truly insane.

In The Visit (original title Der Besuch der alten Dame), Claire Zachanassian, now a multimillion heiress and an older woman, returns to the impoverished town of her youth with a dreadful bargain: in exchange for returning the town to prosperity through her vast wealth, she wants the townspeople to kill the man who jilted her. From its subtle exploration of parochial politics to its horrific climax, The Visit shows a population willing to sacrifice loyalty and scruples in the pursuit of riches. It is a drama of the absurd that reduces human nature to its most ridiculous depths. Durrenmatt was one of the most important figures of modern European drama and The Visit remains both a powerful critique of twentieth century civilisation and an outstanding piece of experimental theatre.

Set in a small town in Switzerland, "The Pledge "centers around the murder of a young girl and the detective who promises the victim's mother he will find the perpetrator. After deciding the wrong man has been arrested for the crime, the detective lays a trap for the real killer--with all the patience of a master fisherman. But cruel turns of plot conspire to make him pay dearly for his pledge. Here Friedrich Durrenmatt conveys his brilliant ear for dialogue and a devastating sense of timing and suspense. Joel Agee's skilled translation effectively captures the various voices in the original, as well as its chilling conclusion.
One of Durrenmatt's most diabolically imagined and constructed novels, "The Pledge" was adapted for the screen in 2000 in a film directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson.

This volume offers bracing new translations of two precursors to the modern detective novel by Friedrich Durrenmatt, whose genre-bending mysteries recall the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and anticipate the postmodern fictions of Paul Auster and other contemporary neo-noir novelists. Both mysteries follow Inspector Barlach as he moves through worlds in which the distinction between crime and justice seems to have vanished. In "The Judge and His Hangman," Barlach forgoes the arrest of a murderer in order to manipulate him into killing another, more elusive criminal. And in "Suspicion," Barlach pursues a former Nazi doctor by checking into his clinic with the hope of forcing him to reveal himself. The result is two thrillers that bring existential philosophy and the detective genre into dazzling convergence.

A respected professor is dead - shot in a crowded Zurich restaurant, in front of dozens of witnesses. The murderer calmly turned himself in to the police. So why has he now hired a lawyer to clear his name? And why has he chosen the drink-soaked, disreputable Spat to defend him? As he investigates, Spat finds himself obsessed, drawn ever deeper into a case of baffling complexity until he reaches a deadly conclusion: justice can be restored only by a crime. This is a captivating neo-noir classic from the master of the genre. The Execution of Justice is a dark, wicked satire on the legal system and a disturbing, if ambivalent, allegory on guilt, justice, violence and morality.

The Swiss writer Friedrich Durrenmatt (1921-90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the cold war, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, "The Visit," With these long-awaited translations of his plays, fictions, and essays, Durrenmatt becomes available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking world.
Durrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays, gathered in the first volume of "Selected Writings," explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. In "The Visit," for instance, an old lady who becomes the wealthiest person in the world returns to the village that cast her out as a young woman and offers riches to the town in exchange for the life of the man, now its mayor, who once disgraced her. Joel Agee's crystalline translation gives a fresh lease to this play, as well as four others: "The Physicists," "Romulus the Great," "Hercules and the Augean Stables," and "The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi,"
Durrenmatt has long been considered a great writer--but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.