The Visit, or The Old Lady Comes to Call

Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Tony Kushner

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781848429598
• eBook ISBN: 9781788503310
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

In the town of Slurry, New York, post-war recession has bitten.

Claire Zachanassian, improbably beautiful and impenetrably terrifying, returns to her hometown as the world's richest woman. The locals hope her arrival signals a change in their fortunes, but they soon realise that prosperity will only come at a terrible price…

Friedrich Dürrenmatt's visionary revenge play, one of the great achievements of modern German-language theatre, has been transported to mid-twentieth-century America by the acclaimed playwright Tony Kushner.

This revelatory new adaptation of The Visit opened in the Olivier auditorium of the National Theatre, London, in February 2020, directed by Jeremy Herrin, and starring Lesley Manville and Hugo Weaving.

ACT ONE

Scene One

A hot afternoon in early autumn. A railroad station, built in the early 1920s, a time of prosperity. There’s a cute little Gothic Revival brick stationhouse, slatted benches flanking the door. In front of the stationhouse, two platforms divide four sets of train tracks – local and express. The local tracks are those nearest the stationhouse. The express tracks are located just past the downstage edge of the stage, in the audience. There’s a station clock on the local platform, mounted atop a rococo cast-iron pole.

A flyspotted, faded cardboard sign on the door announces that the stationhouse is ‘CLOSED’ and ‘THE STATIONMASTER WILL RETURN BY’, beneath which there’s a printed clock without hands. The station clock has both its hands but the hour hand hangs limply down, pointing permanently at 6, while the minute hand spasms uselessly between 50 and 51. Slats are missing from the benches; missing glass from the stationhouse windowpanes has been replaced with plywood; the glass of the display case for the railway schedule is cracked and the schedule lies curled up inside at the case’s bottom. The tracks are almost entirely obscured by weeds. Here and there on the walls of the stationhouse, obscenities both verbal and graphic have been timidly graffitied.

On a chipped enamel sign above the stationhouse door, the name of the town, which apparently is

SLURRY

though the sign is in the process of being eclipsed by the large banner that four men, WALLACE, BILL, BEDNEY and DAN, hoist up in front of it. BELSHA, a painter, stands to one side with a paintbrush tied to a very long pole in one hand and an open can of red paint in the other, an old paint-splattered ladder folded on the ground at his feet.

The BANNER-HOISTERS interrupt their effort at the first warning vibrations of an approaching express train; all five MEN follow the speeding train as it passes the station from left to right, making a tremendous din, raising a wind in its wake that blows the banner all about. The MEN stare at the train long after it’s vanished from sight and hearing. The banner flutters to the ground, a tangled mess. Then:

WALLACE. The Zephyr.

BILL (nodding). BBD&O’s fastest.

WALLACE. Pittsburgh to Augusta in under a day.

BEDNEY. Remember when it used to stop here, Tuesdays northbound, Thursdays south.

BILL. All the express trains stopped at Slurry. Not anymore.

DAN. There was that one time, the Zephyr pulled in and out popped ZaSu Pitts! And that man, that –

BEDNEY. No, ZaSu Pitts came through here once alright but –

DAN (continued from above). What was his name?

BEDNEY (continued from above). – she came in on the Erie- Superior’s Tramontana, Cleveland–Cheektowaga–Hamilton– Ontario.

The four MEN start to straighten out the banner, talking as they do:

BILL. The Tramontana, right, and the Willywaw, the Sirrocco –

WALLACE. Oh, the Sirrocco, I remember her!

BILL (continued from above). – the Bayamo, the Warm Braw and the Squall, the Brubru and the Haboob and –

BEDNEY (to DAN). Slim Summerville.

DAN. Right! Slim Summerville and ZaSu Pitts for the Western New York premiere of Hal Roach’s Niagra Falls at the Slurry Sidereal Panopticon. Mischa Ellman set a world record for ‘The Flight of the Bumblebee’!

BEDNEY. Fifty-three seconds if I’m not mistaken.

DAN. Here. Right here in Slurry.

BILL. Bertrand Russell on the subject of Ethical Mathematics. Blackstone the Magician and his Levitating Donkey. Billy Graham’s Crusades!

WALLACE. This town of ours was once a destination! Now it’s a by-water, bypassed by postwar commercial abundance. Every last one of our factories: closed! The town’s coffers, bone dry! No work, no hope, no future, no –

BELSHA. I studied with Glackens of the Ashcan School! I came to Slurry in search of a subject to paint, and I found it! Here! In the hills of pig-iron ingots behind the Place-In-The-Sun Amalgamated Smelting Plant, I found grim realism but with idiosyncratic coloristic inclinations! And here I’ve remained, watching helplessly as the war’s artificial economic dynamism departed with the arrival of peace and all the goddamn plants closed one by one –

BILL. I was the best turn-key project manager Bockmann’s ever had! Then one day, no warning, Bockmann’s is in receivership, next day shuttered up, and what am I now? Nothing!

DAN. Join the club! My whole life I worked for Place-In-The- Sun Smelting. (To BELSHA.) I used to eat my lunch sitting on them pig-iron hills! All gone now, sold for scrap or God knows, and I get my lunch from the soup kitchen at the church.

BELSHA. A SERIOUS POLITICAL ARTIST and look at me, painting a welcome-home banner for the world’s wealthiest parasite!

Another express train roars by. The men hang on to the sign. The train passes.

WALLACE. Camden & Amboy Extraterritorial Nor’Easter, Hagerstown–Altoona–Belfast–West Seneca.

DAN. We’re alive now only in the sense that moss and lichen are alive. Why?! What happened to us?!

WALLACE (tapping the side of his nose). Dark unfathomable forces at work. About which I need say no more. Now, let’s hoist this banner like we been promised we’ll eventually get paid for doing.

They resume their work hoisting the banner. They get it taut enough to be legible:

WELCOME CLAIRIE!

It spreads open. Offstage, nearby, a screech of brakes and the pneumatic hiss of bus doors opening, followed by a bus driver’s voice: ‘SLUUUUUURRRYYYY!’

MRS BLATTER, a haggard-looking bureaucrat in a rumpled overcoat and discouraged hat, enters dragging a huge, heavy, beaten-up documents case.

Behind her, offstage, the bus doors hiss shut as the driver calls: ‘DUNKIRK! ANGOLA! EDEN! BUUUUUFFALLO!’ and the bus drives away. MRS BLATTER watches it leave. Then she turns to look at the banner, which the MEN are tying in place. As BELSHA sets the ladder up in front of the sign, MRS BLATTER points to it and asks:

MRS BLATTER (reading the sign). ‘Clairie’? That’s a tetch informal, isn’t it?

They stare at her.

When’s she arriving?

WALLACE. Clairie? The 5:19 p.m. local.

BELSHA has started to climb the ladder. MRS BLATTER says to him:

MRS BLATTER. That ladder looks rickety. The town’s insurance has lapsed and creditors have seized the treasury, so good luck trying to sue.

BEDNEY. And who might you be?

MRS BLATTER. Blatter. Bankruptcy manager.

The five MEN look at her.

BILL (to MRS BLATTER). Bankruptcy?

DAN (to his friends). The buzzards are circling! (To MRS BLATTER.) Slurry may be down but don’t count your chickens! We got an ace we ain’t played yet!

WALLACE (pointing at the sign). Richest woman in the goddamned world!! Born here in Slurry! And she’s coming home! Today!

BEDNEY. You read about those hill towns she visited in Italy last summer?!

MRS BLATTER. I didn’t.

WALLACE. Just motoring through! On a whim she retired their debt! And she built ’em a women’s hospital! State-of-the-art!

BEDNEY. And yachting through the Dardanelles, in Patras, Kalamata and Argos, raggedy kids on every street corner, apparently, so in her wake she left behind a chain of nurseries!

WALLACE. The Zachanassian Centers for Infancy Enhancement! Endowed in perpetuity!

MRS BLATTER nods, then goes into the stationhouse. The MEN continue regardless, caught up in telling these stories.

DAN. Can you fathom her money?

WALLACE. The Armenian oil monopoly, railways, radio stations, armaments, pesticides, polyvinyl chloride plants and –

BILL. She drew her first breath right here in Slurry!

BEDNEY. Slurry’s got toddlers! And women to be hospitalized!

WALLACE. Why else would she come back? Nobody visits Slurry! Not anymore!

DAN. I bet you she smells profit in retooling the Reverberatory Aluminum –

BILL sees something approaching. He whistles a quiet alarm to the others:

BILL. Look sharp, fellas, it’s the Welcoming Committee.

The four MEN sna...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• A Note on the Play
• Original Production
• Characters
• The Visit or The Old Lady Comes to Call
• About the Author
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information