Measured in terms of human progress their death was useless, senseless, another of those idiotic strokes of fate that befall mankind from time to time.’
2 Schiess, ‘Remembrance Day’.Der Meteor opens with nudity. The artist Hugo Nyffenschwander is painting his wife, Auguste, who at least has her back to the audience. Into this scene steps Schwitter. After admiring Auguste’s stomach, legs, and breasts, he declares that he has come to rent his former studio for ten minutes in order to die there. But death does not come. When the clergyman Emanuel Lutz enters the studio, he claims that Schwitter has already died and has been resurrected. This marks the beginning of a series of apparent ‘deaths’ and ‘resurrections’, though the audience is never certain whether the former are mistaken pronouncements or the latter divine interventions. In the meantime, almost everyone around Schwitter dies, annihilated by him as by a hurtling meteor, as Dürrenmatt explains: ‘The awareness of his approaching death gives him a tremendous power, a power of destruction.’
3 ‘Das Bewußtsein des nahen Todes verleiht ihm eine ungeheure Kraft, eine Kraft der Zerstörung.’ Dürrenmatt in ‘Ausblick ins Jahr 1964’, Schweizer Illustrierte, 30 December 1963. By the end of the play, Schwitter is begging for death – ‘Wann krepiere ich denn endlich!’ (‘When will I finally croak!’) – while a Salvation Army choir, in awe of the miracle of resurrection, sings God’s praises.
4 Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Meteor (Zurich: Arche, 1966), 71. ~
Figure 15: An informal gathering of some of the actors who played in Schiess’s 1967 production of Die Meteoor – (from left to right) Reon Meij, Boet Dommisse, Christa Zylstra, André Meij, Menno Mennen, Werner Zybrands, (behind) Emsie Botha, Enone van der Bergh, Marina Meij, Heins du Preez.
Described in Dürrenmatt’s ‘Twenty points to
Der Meteor’ as ‘the story of a man who rises up from the dead and doesn’t believe in his resurrection’, the play isn’t easily interpreted.
5 ‘die Geschichte eines Mannes, der aufersteht und seine Auferstehung nicht glaubt’. See Friedrich Dürrenmatt, ‘Zwanzig Punkte zum Meteor’, in Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Der Meteor, Dichterdämmerung (Zurich: Diogenes, 1998), 160. Its ambiguity was noted after its world premiere in Zürich in 1966, prompting the theatre critic Kurt Weibel to ask: ‘Is it a metaphysical joke? Is it a blasphemy? Is it playing loose and fast with the mystery of death? Or could it even be a Christian play?’
6 ‘Ist es ein metaphysischer Scherz? Ist es eine Gotteslästerung? Wird da mit dem Mysterium des Todes Schindluder getrieben? Oder ist es gar ein christliches Stück?’ Kurt Weibel, ‘Der gläubige Dürrenmatt’, TV-Radio-Zeitung, 12–18 February 1966, 37; See also Kurt Weibel, ‘Dürrenmatt und kein Ende’, Radio + Fernsehen, 6–12 February 1966, 5. Dürrenmatt’s ‘Twenty points’ support a religious interpretation, asserting that its protagonist symbolizes modern Christianity and its loss of faith in miracles. But, as Dürrenmatt acknowledges in the same text, only the play itself can be evaluated, not his intentions.
~
Figure 16: Reon Meij as Hugo Nyffenschwander in the Hakahana Players’ Die Meteoor, 1967.
Critics have argued that, because the audience is never certain whether the oft-repeated ‘resurrection’ is sincere, the comical events on stage and Schwitter’s immense personality displace any serious probing of religious concerns.
7 See Tiusanen, Dürrenmatt, 293–308. Several studies have since argued that God occupies a central position in the oeuvre of the self-proclaimed atheist Dürrenmatt, whose father, after all, was a Protestant pastor.
8 See Olivia G. Gabor-Pierce, ‘Friedrich Dürrenmatt: Divine traces in the work of an atheist’, Religion & Literature 39, no. 1 (2007): 101. Yet such a preoccupation is best described as complex and ever-shifting: if Dürrenmatt never abandoned the search for a God, he had long since condemned Christianity and the Church. These scholars have also described
Der Meteor as ‘a modern secular portrayal of death and religious denial’.
9 Ibid., 84.Add to this the play’s opening nudity and the fact that Nyffenschwander’s wife takes off her clothes again at the end of the first act to get into bed with the dying Nobel Laureate, the curtain falling on la petite mort, as it were, it is easy to see how Die Meteoor ruffled conservative Afrikaans feathers when Schiess staged it in 1967.
Schiess was aware that the play had divided critics in Europe the year before, ascribing this to modern humanity’s discomfort around the subject of death:
While we all enjoy the titillation afforded by a quick shot of a screen-corpse with realistically open eyes, much in the same way as our grandfathers nearly fainted from thrill at the sight of an exposed woman’s ankle at the turn of the century, preoccupation with death in a thorough way calls forth something like the reaction Freud’s theories got then. So when Dürrenmatt writes a play about death we must assume that he knows he is being provocative.
10 Mario Schiess, ‘The drama of death’, Pretoria News, 9 June 1967.At the same time, Schiess regarded attempts to silence Dürrenmatt in Afrikaans as a litmus test, arguing that if South Africa had truly reached the point where Dürrenmatt could not be performed, nearly all of modern literature and drama might as well be forbidden.
11 C. M., ‘Dié drama op soek na ’n verhoog in Pretoria’, Die Vaderland, 26 June 1967.