Drama

Kathleen JasonSmith, Jane Dillon, Nicky Banks and Liz Coulter in "The Fire Raisers." Photo: Trevor Ulyatt.

The Drama Club's current production is Max Frisch's The Fire Raisers. Frisch is a Swiss dramatist writing in German, who won international acclaim almost simultaneously with his compatriot Friedrich Durrenmatt at the end of the WW II. His Swiss background has had a profound effect on his plays, largely owing to Switzerland's unique position during the war. The Swiss were the only German-speaking people untouched by Nazism endowing them with feelings of complacency and moral superiority. Many of Frisch's plays are an attack against this complacency and narrow bourgeois respectability, and are concerned with the question of the individual's responsibility in the face of widespread moral corruption. Frisch is determined not to free himself from the guilt of his age just because he shared Switzerland's neutrality—he shows in his plays how even those who appear to have every bourgeois virtue may also carry within themselves the seeds of moral corruption, and so deserve to share society's guilt.

Basically The Fire Raisers is about human beings—ordinary people living ordinary lives; and about fire raisers—people who burn down ordinary houses and ordinary cities. Whether it is also about Communist "coups", Vietcong "insurgencies", Nazi "putsches", or pyromaniacs is arguable. But to impose any or all of these situations in a production of the play would be totally wrong.

The only certain things are that Gottlieb Biedermann and his wife belong to a comfortable bourgeoisie; Schmitz and Eisenring, the fire raisers, do not. Biedermann rages about the wickedness and dangers of the fire raisers, but deliberately avoids recognising them when they appear in his own home. Schmitz and Eisenring simply fight fires. Perhaps they are Nazis; perhaps they are insane; perhaps they are cold. Frisch calls his play a "Morality without a Moral". The moral is up to the audience.