The Visit: relationships between performers and audience

‘The Visit’: Relationships between Performers and Audience

Audience Awareness

Throughout ‘The Visit’, Friedrich Dürrenmatt expertly manipulates the fourth wall to bring the audience into a close relationship with the performers. This is done through direct address and meta-theatrical elements, such as hints about the play’s structure and its inherent theatricality.
Specifically, the character of ‘the schoolmaster’ acts as a quasi-narrator whose direct addresses to the audience help to establish the relationship between performers and viewers. His commentary and explanations guide the audience through the play, allowing for a deeper understanding and more directly engaging the audience.

Division and Merging of Characters

The town’s people of ‘Gullen’ are often portrayed as a single entity on stage, with shared lines and synchronised movements. This particularly Brechtian strategy blurs the boundaries between the individual characters, positioning them as a collective that takes a singular stance towards Claire’s proposition.
This merging of characters helps the audience to view the citizens of Gullen as a microcosm of a society that is subject to influence and corruption, promoting the audience’s understanding of the broader societal critique in the play.

Manipulation of Emotions

‘The Visit’ aims to encourage intellectual engagement rather than emotional identification, typifying Brecht’s notion of the ‘alienation effect’. Audience members are not intended to empathise with the characters but to critique and question their actions.
Despite this, Dürrenmatt does push the audience’s emotional responses in certain cases. The death of Ill, for example, is portrayed in a highly emotional way, challenging the audience’s engagement with the play’s moral and societal themes, and resulting in a more complex and nuanced performer-audience dynamic.

Symbolic Imagery

The use of physical theatre, such as the empty coffin carried by the townspeople, serves to enhance storytelling and amplifies the play’s symbolism. This adds to the complexity of the relationship between performers and audience.
The symbolic imagery complements the play’s critique of societal decay. By using stark images that can be seen but not explained, such as the black panther and Claire’s prosthesis, Dürrenmatt encourages an active audience that interprets and engages with the play in a cognitive, rather than an emotional, way.

Impact of Staging

The staging and set also play a crucial role in shaping the relationship between performers and audience. For instance, the train station, as a non-naturalistic set, allows for dramatic representations of the town’s economic decline and reinforces the sense of alienation experienced by the audience.
Through the theatrical use of spaces and objects, Dürrenmatt creates a unique multi-dimensional performance that keeps the audience engaged and contributes to the overall thematic exploration within ‘The Visit’.