One Little Goat’s Ritter, Dene, Voss

On a brief visit to Toronto, I had the pleasure of attending the English-language premiere of Thomas Bernhard’s Ritter, Dene, Voss, directed by Adam Seelig and presented by his One Little Goat company. I came to the performance somewhat sceptical about the ability of anyone outside of Austria and Germany to direct Bernhard, but Seelig’s production impressed and delighted me from the first. Bernhard wrote the text in 1984 as a tribute to “three intelligent actors.” The play is also about Bernhard’s ongoing reflections on Paul Wittgenstein’s madness (previously explored in his novel Wittgenstein’s Neffe [1982]) and his continuing fascination with the Wittgensteins’ reclusiveness, particularly Ludwig’s obsessive revising of his writings, his general misanthropy and his “Germanophobia,” a trait exploited by Bernhard in all his texts as a continuous diatribe against Austria, a nation “of six and a half million idiots living in a country rotting away . . .”