Handke Plays: 1

Peter Handke's work is amongst the most strikingly original of all post-war European writing (Times Educational Supplement) Offending the Audience is "a dissection of our expectations about what ought to happen in the theatre." Self-Accusation is "a cunning and ironic attack on bureaucratic moral guilt" (Observer); Kaspar is based on the true story of Kaspar Hauser, a sixteen year old boy who appeared from nowhere in Nuremberg in 1828 and who had to be taught to speak from scratch. Handke's play is a downright attack on the way language is used by a corrupt society to depersonalise the individual; My Foot My Tutor is a mime for two actors - "Handke has here written an hour-long play without words that may at first look like a piece of audience-provocation but that finishes up as sheer theatrical poetry" (Guardian). In The Ride across Lake Constance, a group of characters (known only by the names of the actors who perform the parts) talk and play games together and skate over the thin ice that separates them from unspoken danger. "Intensely theatrical...an author for whom playwriting seems akin to tightrope walking" (The Times). They Are Dying Out puts the pillars of the bourgeoisie under the microscope to reveal an alien race, suffocated by rationality, unable to cope with untamed subjective impulses and shows an "uncanny knack for making the familiar seem strange" (Plays and Players).

Peter Handke was born in Griffen, Austria, in 1942 and studied law at the University of Graz. In 1996 his first novel was published and his first play, Offending the Audience, was staged in Frankfurt. This was seen in London in 1971 and was followed by productions of My Foot My Tutor (1971), Self Accusation, Prophecy and Calling for Help (1972), Kaspar and The Ride Across Lake Constance(1973), the latter transferring successfully to the West End, They are Dying Out (National Theatre, 1976 and The Long Way Round (National Theatre, 1989). His novels and other writings include The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (subsequently made into an award-winning film), Short Letter, Long Farewelland the semi-autobiographical A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, which were published in Britain in 1977; The Left-Handed Woman (1980), a novel drawn from this his film of the same title, which he directed himself; the trilogy of thematically connected novels, Slow Homecoming (1985); his novel Across (1986); Repetition (1988); Afternoon of a Writer (1989); and Absence (1990).