Manfred Jurgensen

Rehearsing the Endgame: Max Frisch’s Biography: A Play

Believing that all human life consists of self-conscious role-playing, Frisch adopts a theatre of rehearsal as paradigm for staging imaginary variations of personal identity. In his comedy Bio- graphy, marriage is seen as the most intimate social model of role-playing. Linking its drama- turgy to the reconstruction of a lost game of chess, the fictional freedom of self-expression as- sumes fatal finality. Antoinette is the ‘queen’ with ‘all the moves’, while checkmate Kürmann loses his life. Based on playful identification of the actors with the spectators, Biography trans- forms the audience into participants. In an almost Brechtian manner, it demonstrates the model character of human identification, thereby allowing the theatre to reveal and play itself. The place of comedy is the stage, ‘completely identical with itself’. The ultimate self-realisation is death. Live rehearsals prove terminal. The comedy about death reflects the paradoxical nature of fiction and reality, identity and authorship. ‘Life theatre’ is a play within a play, a rehearsal of variable selves until the game is over.

Max Frisch’s Biografie: Ein Spiel appeared in 1967, at the height of the au- thor’s international reputation, both as a playwright and a novelist.1 It takes its subject from a couple of lines, spoken by Vershinin, in Act One of Che- khov’s classic Three Sisters:

I often think: what if one were to begin life over again, but consciously? If one life, which has already been lived, were only a rough draft, so to say, and the other the final copy! Then each of us, I think, would try above everything not to repeat himself, at least he would create a different setting for his life, he would arrange an apartment like this for himself, with flow- ers and plenty of light … I have a wife and two little girls, but then, my wife is not in good health, and so forth and so on, and … well, if I were to begin life over again, I wouldn’t marry … No, No!2

1 Max Frisch, Biografie: Ein Spiel (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1967). All quotations in this chapter are mine and refer to this edition, to which page numbers will be given in the text. It has also been translated by Michael Bullock as Biography: A Game (New York: Hill and Wang, 1969). 2 In Anton Chekhov: The Major Plays, trans. by Ann Dunnigan (New York: The New Amer- ican Library, Signet Classic, 1964), p. 250. 102 Manfred Jurgensen

But, of course, the idea of living one’s life over again, with the aim of ‘cor- recting it’, applying the wisdom of hindsight, is not merely a quotation from one of the great plays of world theatre. It’s a widely indulged-in popular re- flection of wishful thinking, by no means confined to men experiencing a midlife crisis, trying to escape their marriage. It is not a literary theme asso- ciated with one specific period of history or belonging to only one particular culture. Indeed, Frisch believes that, far from being pathological, it is in the nature of individual identity to be made up of multiple fictional personalities. Like Vershinin, his own protagonist, Kürmann, has no doubt that ‘If he could start again, he’d know exactly what changes he’d make in his life’ (Biografie, p. 7). Having decided to take Chekhov’s character (as well as his own) at his word, Frisch adopts a surprisingly simple dramaturgical model, uniquely suit- ed to put their assertion to the test. It is a theatrical form designed to enact a wide range of incomplete, variable projections. In spite of the protagonist’s determined resolution to escape repetition, it is ironically in the starting-point of theatre, the rehearsal, that the playwright finds the perfect paradigm for staging imaginary variations of personal identity. It is precisely because of its constant repetition, the freedom to correct, change, vary and improve, that Frisch elevates the rehearsal to the dramaturgical level of performance. In the process of rehearsing, projecting, testing and evaluating various possibilities, fictional characters and self-conscious actors amalgamate. Such theatre lends voice to Frisch’s conviction that ultimately all human lives (‘biographies’) consist of self-conscious imaginary role-playing. The drama’s programmatic title proclaims this very correlation quite unequivo- cally. It is significant that in his notes the author compares this dramaturgy not just to a ‘game’ of chess, but, more precisely, to the ‘reconstruction’ of a ‘lost game’ of chess (Biografie, p. 111). The repetition of constant variation, emerging as the central formal device from which all other aspects of the play (plot, dialogue, etc.) derive, nonetheless leads by design to a final, fatal, ultimate version – the defeat in a fictional game promising unlimited moves and possibilities, a triumphant freedom of self-expression. The special feature of Frisch’s ‘comedy’, as he labels it, is that, as for Chekhov’s Vershinin, marriage appears as the most intimate social model of role-playing. In an ironic double entendre, Kürmann explains the game of chess to his future wife, Antoinette, ‘That’s the queen. She’s got all the moves’ (Biografie, p. 11). Later in the play Kürmann is asked, ‘Is that all you ever think about, your marriage?… Is that your problem in this world?’ (Bio- grafie, p. 84). As almost all of Frisch’s plays and novels do in fact feature tragi-comic marital conflicts, it is difficult not to recognize in these questions,