Reading Order
The Visit Reading Order
The Visit (1956) by Friedrich Dürrenmatt is one of the most perfect examples of the Brechtian parable in the postwar European theater — a dark comedy organized around the arrival of a very rich old woman in a very poor small town. Clara Zachanassian returns to Güllen, the Swiss town where she grew up, the richest woman in the world; she offers the town a billion marks on the condition that someone kills Alfred Ill, who seduced and abandoned her forty years ago and destroyed her reputation. The town initially refuses — but gradually, as they begin spending against the expected inheritance, as their shoes become new and their cigarettes expensive and their groceries appear on credit, the logic of the situation becomes irresistible. Dürrenmatt called the play 'a tragic comedy': it has the precision and inevitability of Greek tragedy, the blackness and comedy of Brecht, and a moral seriousness that refuses to let anyone off the hook — not Clara, not the townspeople, and not the audience who understands the mechanism while the townspeople live inside it.
Where to start
The Visit (1956) — the complete text in the James Kirkup translation (later revised by Dürrenmatt himself as The Visit: A Tragi-Comedy).
Complete The Visit Book List
- 1Buy
The Visit
Friedrich Dürrenmatt·1956·The complete play — Clara Zachanassian, Alfred Ill, and the town of Güllen. One of the defining plays of the postwar European theater; the first production starred Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in the Peter Brook Broadway production in 1958 - 2Buy
The Physicists
Friedrich Dürrenmatt·1962·Dürrenmatt's companion play about three physicists in a psychiatric hospital. The companion investigation of the same dark comic mechanism: a situation that appears to have a moral solution but is organized so that no moral solution is possible - 3Buy
The Good Person of Setzuan
Bertolt Brecht·1943·Brecht's companion parable play about the impossibility of being good in an economic system that punishes goodness. The companion Brechtian investigation of the same question: what happens when the economic logic of a situation is incompatible with moral behavior? Both plays are organized as parables; both demonstrate the same mechanism; both refuse consolation - 4Buy
Mother Courage and Her Children
Bertolt Brecht·1939·Brecht's companion parable play about the impossibility of profiting from war without losing everything. The companion investigation of the economic logic that governs human behavior: Mother Courage and Clara Zachanassian are companion figures, both women who have learned to survive through ruthlessness, both plays organized around the mechanism by which economic calculation destroys human feeling - 5Buy
The Price
Arthur Miller·1968·Miller's companion play about two brothers arguing over the value of their dead father's furniture. The companion investigation of the same subject that organizes The Visit: the relationship between price (economic value) and worth (moral value), and the way that economic calculation crowds out moral judgment - 6Buy
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
Bertolt Brecht·1941·Brecht's companion parable play about the rise of a Hitler-figure in the Chicago cauliflower trade. The companion investigation of the mechanism by which an entire community becomes complicit in evil: in The Visit, Güllen's complicity is economic; in Arturo Ui, the cauliflower merchants' complicity is also economic and also follows the same inevitable logic - 7Buy
The Master Builder
Henrik Ibsen·1892·Ibsen's companion investigation of the relationship between an older figure's power and the arrival of someone from the past who disturbs it. The companion as the prototype: Clara Zachanassian's return to Güllen is the dark inversion of Hilde Wangel's arrival at Halvard Solness's — both are women from the past who arrive to settle accounts, but where Hilde's demand is for the impossible, Clara's demand is for the all-too-possible - 8Buy
Everyman
Anonymous·1510·The medieval morality play about the soul's journey at the moment of death. The companion as the prototype of the parable form: Dürrenmatt's The Visit is organized around the same moral mechanism as Everyman — a figure who must face judgment for what they have done — but where Everyman is about divine judgment, The Visit is about human judgment that has been purchased by economic power
The Visit — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Visit by Dürrenmatt about?
The Visit is about Clara Zachanassian — the richest woman in the world — returning to the small Swiss town of Güllen where she grew up, and offering the town a billion marks on the condition that someone kills Alfred Ill, who seduced her when she was young, denied he was the father of her child, bribed two witnesses to perjure themselves, and destroyed her reputation. The town initially refuses — Ill is now a respected citizen — but gradually, as they begin spending against the expected inheritance, as new shoes appear and cigarettes improve and the butcher starts offering credit, the economic logic of the situation becomes irresistible. The play is about the mechanism by which an entire community becomes complicit in murder: not through malice, but through the ordinary economic calculations that everyone makes every day.
Why is Dürrenmatt called a dark comedian?
Dürrenmatt is called a dark comedian because his plays use comic structure (precise plotting, incongruous situations, theatrical artifice) in the service of deeply pessimistic moral investigation. The Visit is organized like a dark fairy tale — the richest woman in the world returns to her hometown to exact revenge — but its mechanism is rigorously realistic: the town's complicity in murder follows the same economic logic that governs ordinary commercial life. The Physicists is organized like a detective story set in a psychiatric hospital, but its punchline is the impossibility of keeping scientific knowledge contained once it has been discovered. Both plays use the precision and elegance of comic form to deliver conclusions about human nature that are not comic at all.
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