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The Gentle Moralist The Playwright and Novelist Lukas Bärfuss By Roman Bucheli
At the end of the 1990s a young man entered the literary arena with tales of the grotesque. Madcap ideas, cryptic humour and a touch of melancholy were the distinguishing features of his writing. It was evident that the creator of these pieces – only a few knew his identity – was possessed of no mean talent and potential. But these short stories were rough diamonds, so to speak, very clearly a beginner’s work, and the tools the author had at his disposal were no match for the rush of his ideas. Here none the less, or so one felt, was a young writer with a future. Born in 1971 in Thun, Switzerland, Lukas Bärfuss trained as a bookseller after leaving school, completing those studies in the summer of 1997. At that point, without further ado, he handed in his notice and, as he explained once in an interview, announced that he was now a writer. He had nothing published to show for this claim, just a few drafts in the drawer of his desk. This abrupt and apparently self-confident launch into a literary existence did not just determine Bärfuss’s subsequent path; it remains to this day characteristic of his place in the literary world, and indeed of his writing in general. Neither as a playwright nor as a prose writer did he become part of a literary group or trend, but sought his own place in the contemporary creative scene. That is not to say that he opted to work in splendid isolation. On the contrary, in 1998 he, along with director Samuel Schwarz, founded the theatre group 400asa for which from then on he regularly wrote plays that evolved and were performed as works in a collective manner. The same holds true for his choice of material: more so than almost any of his contemporaries Lukas Bärfuss has a razor-sharp feel for the pressing questions of our time, for the conflicts in society and the afflictions of individuals. And, almost without parallel among playwrights, he is an avowed moralist. Not that he raps people’s knuckles as Max Frisch did, nor would he depict the world as Friedrich Dürrenmatt did in his Valley of Confusion; rather, Beckett-fashion, he shows man and woman in extreme situations, without apportioning blame but none the less from the viewpoint of the behavioural scientist. He is, in fact, a gentle moralist who doesn’t steer the characters of his plays (or of his novella Die toten Männer – ‘The Dead Men’, 2002 – his longest prose piece to date) into difficulties from a desire to see them fail, but as a means of putting the troubles and fears of human beings under the microscope. It is rather devotion to all that is human, as opposed to any contempt for our all-too-human condition, that makes him a moralist. ‘To me people are at their most human when they are living with all their contradictions and attempting to handle them,’ he says. ‘All of us are heroes in the same way. However, being weak, failing, there’s something very personal and charming about that.’ Perhaps it is this sympathy on the part of the writer for the diverse weaknesses of his characters that, whether on the page or on the stage, makes them seem anything but the puppets of a pedagogical zealot but instead the often lovable, often disarming, at times repulsive, at times disturbing cast of a comédie humaine, no strangers to the abysses of anguish. The year 2000 saw Lukas Bärfuss’s breakthrough as a playwright. Between January and June of that year, from Zurich to Vienna, no fewer than four productions of his plays were premiered. Since then he has become one of the most widely performed writers on the German-speaking stage. In 2005 his play Der Bus (‘The Bus’) was voted play of the year by the magazine Theater heute (‘Theatre Today’ – Germany’s principal magazine for the theatre) and in the same year he was awarded the Mülheimer Dramatiker Preis (an influential prize for best playwright of the year). More recently he was named as the winner of the 2007 Spycher Literaturpreis (a special prize that provides a quiet place to write, be it in the hamlet of Leuk or in a chalet in the nearby Alpine valley, for two months each year for five years). Part of the fascination of Bärfuss’s plays is how they provide the director and the actors with an extremely open text, one that virtually demands an interpretation that will lend it form. Bärfuss doesn’t write the sort of theatre that can be boiled down to a few theories. His dialogue is devoid of all artificiality and is now and then closer to the traditional, illusionist theatre of realism. This not only leaves room for dramatic staging, it also positively demands it. The text is the transparency, the performance its rendering into concrete and relevant form. At the same time the plays are an excellent read. They lack neither wit nor tempo, graphicness nor deep emotions. Leaving aside his anti-illusionist play Meienbergs Tod (‘Meienberg’s Death’) which, through the taking apart of a 1968 guru, tells of the later self-unravelling of some of his disciples, Lukas Bärfuss’s plays often tackle the conflicts of society, not offering solutions but highlighting the pains and paradoxes of human behaviour without prejudice and without intrusion of the judgemental. To achieve this, Bärfuss largely abstains from either stylistic or dramatic experimentations. His realism sometimes goes so far as to have his plays set in the place where he came across the material. Alices Reise in die Schweiz (‘Alice’s Journey to Switzerland’) deals with a hospice which helps its clients to commit suicide. This hospice in Switzerland exists and now attracts clients from all over Europe, much to the displeasure of the local authorities and to the annoyance of the other inhabitants of the building, who have to put up with almost daily visitations from undertakers and the police. It is housed in Zurich, and Bärfuss’s play gives its actual address. The cast consists of the wildly enthusiastic doctor, a man of missionary zeal who, when he’s struck off the register, resorts to sending his clients to their rooms not with barbiturates but with a plastic bag to draw over their heads, and of various willing clients; we see the owner of the building pocketing healthy sums while putting on an ostentatious show of tolerance, and, at the same time, the indignation of the clinic’s neighbours. For, as always, Bärfuss’s aim is not to speak out for or against this form of euthanasia. He throws the question open for discussion, and after that he has done his bit. It is up to the audience, should they feel so inclined, to go more deeply into the issue. Lukas Bärfuss is interested in what drives people to help others to die, what is going on inside the heads of people who want to die – before their time – but don’t have the strength to perform the act for themselves. This apparently distanced and objective gaze is no cloak for any kind of indifferent amorality; on the contrary it embodies an expression of openness that offers no escape for the audience in the form of facile relief. Similar conditions prevail in Die sexuellen Neurosen unserer Eltern (‘The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents’), a play about a family with a mentally handicapped child in which questions of sexuality and compulsory psychiatry are intensified to such a degree that the characters are forced into a collision path with their contradictions and prejudices. But here, too, the author refrains from any accusatory gestures: he merely shows what is going on inside people who are driven into a corner, for whatever reason. What to make of it is not a question he sets out to answer. Whereas here, as also in Der Bus – a play that puts bigotry under the miscroscope during a pilgrimage to Czestochowa – the topic is given the treatment of the grotesque, it is most movingly explored in the play Die Probe (‘The Rehearsal’), in which doubt is cast on the paternity of an apparently happy family man and seeps into his world like a poison. A paternity test meant to clear the matter up confirms the suspicion – and disaster follows its inexorable path. Lukas Bärfuss has had success on stage, but his ambitions are just as high when it comes to books. He has been working on a novel for some time, after the aforementioned novella Die toten Männer (‘The Dead Men’) was published to admittedly mixed reviews. Technical shortcomings jeopardised an otherwise interesting plot. A middle-aged man turns murderer – or so it is assumed, for it is never spelled out – with his future son-in-law the victim. He is investigated by the police and envisages his imminent arrest with a certain satisfication. But there’s not sufficient evidence and no charges are brought against him. At the book’s conclusion the man returns to his wife (from whom he had separated), takes her into his confidence and afterwards remains with her: on the face of it a free man, but his soul is her prisoner. The protagonist reconciles himself to this paradoxical resolving of the conflict and thus follows in the footsteps of Max Frisch’s Stiller. Bärfuss the novelist has yet to match Bärfuss the playwright. But one may have high expectations on both counts for this still relatively young man. What he has achieved to date is remarkable enough and worthy of the high regard in which he is already held.
‘In the central character of Dora, Bärfuss has created a character so true and uninhibited that no audience member can fail to be moved by her journey. The play deals with sex, our relationship to sex and the central question of whether an individual with mental disabilities should be allowed to decide for themselves about their own sexual destiny. It is a forceful, rude and tender play, which never judges. Ultimately its central question is almost unanswerable, making for deeply provocative viewing.’ At the Gate Theatre through September 2007.
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