Over two decades after his death, Friedrich Dürrenmatt remains known as Switzerland’s greatest twentieth-century playwright. His plays are avant-garde staples. He’s also a confirmed part of the Western mainstream: in the sixties, one of his most successful works (The Visit) was made into a film starring Anthony Quinn and Ingrid Bergman. Dürrenmatt is praised for a brand of aesthetically and socially unsettling comedy: irreverent, discomfiting, virtuosically slapdash. Much of what makes his plays instantly recognizable as dark humor is their disconcerting, near-cacophonic polyphony. This polyphony comes from how many characters he tends to juxtapose but also from the way these characters fall in and out of different genres or conventions—occasionally even breaking into song—and from the sheer gaudiness of color and prop detail with which he insists on spattering his staging. READ MORE
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| The Possible is Monstrous A Collection of Poems by Friedrich Dürrenmatt Translated by Daniele Pantano Black Lawrence Press, 2010 216 pages Reviewed by Marta Figlerowicz |
