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Meteor

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"The Meteor" is not one of Dürrenmatt's top books, but it definitely is a milestone in Dürrenmatt corpus. The play shows the Friedrich Dürrenmatt of late 40s - 50s moving into a much compositely integrated theatre theory and performance aspects. Something he repeatedly spoke of in his PROBLEMS OF THE THEATER.

The play deals with the Biblical Lazarus state of mind - that of non-dying. The protagonist Wolfgang Schwitter is in many ways biographical of Dürrenmatt himself as much as Friedrich Korbes of INCIDENT AT TWILIGHT was. A nobel prize winner (which the author never was, but was fashionable of talking about), a controversial writer, an artist who started his life as a painter and found to his horror that he could only draw caricatures and turned to playwriting, Schwitter much like Dürrenmatt later became a fiction writer. The play deals with his wish to die but inability to die. The play is an absolute theatre craftsman's delight. The possibilities that open out for any techie who wants to experiment with lights, sets, props - are enormous. Also a challenge.

The play begins with Schwitter entering the atelier of Nyffenschwander, an impoverished artist who is painting nudes of his wife to eke out living, and is occupying currently the studio that Schwitter occupied when he himself had no money. The couple are surprised. Schwitter is supposedly dead. The papers are full of it. The television and radio are streaming the news. But Schwitter is alive. The rest of the play is a riot. Dürrenmatt's mastery of the absurd, the grotesque and love for the comedy of confrontation and dance of death is at its crescendo. While every character that comes into contact with Schwitter die or is killed or run into misfortune (including his own son who wants Schwitter to die in order to inherit the legacy), Schwitter rants and desperately does a Lear in self-pity, wanting to die. But death would not come to him. In the course of the play, Dürrenmatt does not spare a single institution - Real estate agents, medical estate, Mafia, Politicians, Journalists, Literary critics, Church, Salvation Army, Artists and not the least - the civilisation's most ancient institution - prostitution.

It is ironic and perhaps the capping point in the work that Dürrenmatt subtly answers the charges of the feminists and women critics who had taken cudgels against him for his treatment or the mis-treatment of female characters in his works, by having Schwitter lambast and launch in to a tirade against the monstrosity of the world, and how he himself could empathise with the Madame Frau Nomsen. Alas, to realise that while he was talking, Nomsen is dead. And the Salvation army enters.... I leave the rest to you.

Whoever tries to dissuade you from reading this work - do not pay attention. Read for yourselves and then decide. I guess, for theatre artists - actors, lighting designers, set designers, directors - this is definitely a challenging work of art.