 The Visit is a 1956 tragicomedy by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt.
A wealthy woman returns to her debt-ridden home town and offers a sum greater than they ever imagined to help out... but she has one horrifying condition: the death of her ex-lover. Ringing denial of the demand is followed by the gradual corruption of everyone in town.
Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit of the Old Lady) premiered in Zurich in 1956, when Friedrich Dürrenmatt was 35. It was such a success that productions sprang up in England and American over the next several years.
With the ashes of World War II still in their mouths, the people of Europe in the 1950s faced the growing Cold War and the shadow of the atomic bomb. The question of how a man can hold on to his ideals in the face of grinding poverty was still a strong one. The Visit tells the story of a community which slowly yields to temptation... yet this yielding must be understandable. The temptation is too great, the poverty is too bitter. Dürrenmatt uses the people of Gullen to show the weakness of authority, the disorder just beneath the civilization's order.
"We no longer find tragic heroes, but only tragedies staged by world butchers and carried out by meat-grinding machines... power today is only minimally visible, since like an iceberg the largest part is sunk in faceless abstraction... Today's state has become impossible to survey, anonymous and bureaucratic... genuinely representative people are lacking and the tragic heroes have no name."
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