Offending the Audience by Peter Handke

First published:Publikumsbeschimpfung, 1966 (English translation, 1969, in Kaspar and Other Plays)

First produced: 1966, at the Theater am Turm, Frankfurt, West Germany

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: Concurrent with the evening’s production

Locale: Unspecified

Principal Characters:

• Four Speakers, who are neither named nor differentiated

The Play

Before the speeches of Offending the Audience begin, Peter Handke’s script contains a section titled “Rules for the actors.” The four speakers are urged to seek out forms of popular art and other experiences which, presumably, would help to free them from the methods of delivery or acting inculcated by their previous training. The actors are told to strive for a sameness of sound, without individual inflection, as if in a crowd or ritual situation; they are also told to make up the partially inarticulate lines and deliver those lines very fast in overlapping and even simultaneous fashion.

Before the curtain opens and the lights onstage and in the auditorium are turned up, the audience is to have the typical pre-performance experiences: formally attired ushers, proper programs, and noises from behind the closed curtain that sound like a crew setting up. When the curtain parts, the equal lighting of both stage and auditorium, a stage without props or scenery, actors who rehearse invectives which cannot be completely heard, all signal to the audience that the play will not be traditional, and perhaps not entertaining. The audience is welcomed, the piece is announced as a “prologue,” and the actors proceed with a series of lines, the grammatical subject of which is “you.”

The first task of the speakers is to disillusion the audience as to what it will see and hear. Attention is caught by a paradox: On one hand the audience will not see what it usually sees; on the other hand it will see nothing that is really unusual. The play or prologue will not create another world, with props, fictional characters, and compelling plot. The stage does not represent a room, with an invisible wall between the actors and the audience, as in realistic theater where members of the audience are in the position of onlookers and eavesdroppers. Gestures and speeches are not meant to suggest anything other than what they would in normal, direct communication. In this sense, the audience will not experience anything unusual.

In the course of disillusioning the audience, the speakers make it aware of the illusions or assumptions it brings into the (any) theater. It expects a different time, a suspension of real time; it expects a transformed space; it expects a story told in actions (words, deeds) of people who are spotlighted in that space. In this prologue, the time is now, the world is this theater tonight, the action is what happens to the audience. Meaning will come from what the audience realizes about itself and most theater audiences. The speakers “review” the audience, the way a spectator or critic might review a play: The audience is characterized variously as “charming,” “breathtaking,” and “not a brilliant idea,” unconvincing in its debut performance. Later, in the “name-calling section” of the play, the audience is likewise characterized as completely convincing and realistic even while it is criticized for being nothing but cheap imitations.

Being onstage, what does the audience do? The speakers have described the audience’s expectations; now they turn to a singular “you” in their address and begin to describe the typical viewer’s self-consciousness—of the body, the muscles, the heartbeat, breathing, blinking, salivating. The speakers ask the members of the audience to try not to blink, breath, hear, salivate—in short, not to live. Then the speakers ask the audience why it continues to do these things. They order the audience to cease. Then they order the audience to do these things. Now, the speakers assert, members of the audience are fully aware of themselves as being at the center of this world. The speakers begin to taunt the audience, gently, by telling it that they could well have represented another reality or significance, but they did not. In speaking, they do not imitate fictional characters and they do not even represent themselves; they merely communicate with the audience. They repeat the opening statement, “This piece is a prologue,” explaining that it is prologue to attending theater and to living. The speakers sketch the immediate future of the audience, the shifting in seats, the rising, the passage out of the theater, the fragmenting and dispersing of the audience into individual lives.

Up to this point, the piece is also prologue to the speakers’ “offending the audience,” which some critics have thought to be the main action. Beginning with favorable comments on the audience as players in the drama of the prologue, the speakers move into several paragraphs of such names as “ass-kissers,” “scum of the melting pot,” “sitting ducks,” “dirty Jews,” “napalm specialists,” “killer pigs,” and “farts.” The outpouring does not really define a single despised object, but there are two themes to the invective: The audience, like all audiences, sits passively and takes whatever the playwright/actors dish out; the audience, like all humanity, contains the full range of types and vices. The last name applied to the audience, in fact, is “you fellow humans you.” The speakers close politely: “You were welcome here. We thank you. Good night.” The curtain closes, then opens again to reveal the actors standing, looking into space. Recorded applause and noise plays over the loudspeaker system until the audience disperses.

Dramatic Devices

As a “speak-in,” Offending the Audience deliberately undercuts or omits the traditional devices of drama. Scenery, props, lights, story, fictional characters, and action are not factors. The normal devices of poetic-dramatic language are undercut or omitted too. Peter Handke wants no metaphors, analogies, or images to suggest another level of reality.

Offending the Audience is not another existential or absurdist play about meaninglessness or the absence of all value. Language communicates meaning in this play. The speeches set up and develop ideas with some logic, although the frequent contradictions and repetitions tend to mask the logic. First, the piece seeks to expose and deny the traditional expectations of theater. Second, the speakers seek to turn the audience’s attention on itself, in particular to the way the audience really “creates” the full dramatic experience by seeking or adding significance to the dialogue, scenic elements, and actions onstage. The speakers emphasize the audience’s role both in this piece and in traditional drama by engaging in a mocking “review” of the audience’s performance on this night. This review inevitably leads to the most dramatic part of the prologue, the offensive name-calling. Third, in the outpouring of names, an epic catalog of positive and negative categories of humanity, the audience is made aware that the world of theater and the world of reality are similar in that they are constituted by language.

In a real sense, Handke believes, language and the categories it creates structure all of humanity’s consciousness. Once the audience realizes this, the speakers remind them, in a fourth stage, that they as actors could easily have created imaginative drama and that the audience, as a group of separate individuals, can now better appreciate what happens in normal drama through language and gestures. Hence, this piece is a “prologue” to normal drama, which is evoked by the recorded audience reaction to other dramatic events that is played over the sound system at the end of the piece.

Other devices that structure or order Offending the Audience are linguistic. The speakers speak very simple, direct sentences, with a limited vocabulary and much repetition. The use of “you” as plural subject puts the emphasis on the audience as a group; the use of the present tense put the emphasis on the present moment, a moment of expectation, denial, and (Handke hopes) enlightenment. Once the piece has focused attention on the collective audience, the speakers can shift to a singular “you” and imperative sentences, to raise individual consciousness of how one is alive during the drama and how one thus participates in creating the meaning of the drama. The offensive invective or name-calling marks a peak of drama, but also a peak of words as words, since the names are not part of larger, meaningful sentences. Further, by piling up names that do not add up to one type of person or even one moral perspective, by setting up phrases of names that are approximately equal in length and similar in order, the speakers empty them of their usual application, and the audience should become aware of language as a rhythm of sounds, as acoustical pattern. Perhaps the audience even realizes that the meaning of language, too, is something people add to ordered sounds, not something the sounds have in and of themselves.

Critical Context

The term “speak-in” situates this piece in the cultural upheaval and literary experimentation of the 1960’s. “Be-ins,” “guerrilla theater,” “street theater,” and “happenings” were terms applied to dramatic events designed to break outside forms and physical restrictions of conventional theater. They were often loosely scripted so as to create maximum involvement of the audience. The aim of these events was to create an “experience” that would be unique for each occasion, perhaps never repeated in exactly the same way.

Although Peter Handke’s piece is more conservative in its staging, deliberately setting itself on a stage in a theater even while it denies the conventions of the theater, it does have a measure of the spontaneity of these earlier forms in that the actors are instructed to make up speeches when they approach the front of the stage in the beginning and, once they are positioned, to choose their parts in whatever order they decide. On different nights, each speaker might deliver different lines. There are, however, limits to the openness of this piece: Apart from the fact that the order makes logical sense, it is a self-contained work with no scripted “openings” for the audience. The audience is expected to “sit and take it,” just as if it were watching traditional drama.

This factor opens up the other aspect of the category, “speak-in,” that Handke sets up. If the title suggests certain spontaneous and loosely constructed dramatic experiences popular in the 1960s and 1970’s, it also suggests the political protests of that period. Offending the Audience features a strong measure of argumentation, didacticism, and harangue. The audience is lectured, chastised, and even called names for the purpose of education or, to use a phrase popular in the 1960’s, consciousness-raising.

Offending the Audience, Handke’s first published play, is often read less as a manifesto than as a thematic guide to his early works. It connects to a protest Handke made the same year (1966), when he accused a distinguished gathering of German authors of clinging to old forms of moral realism. In Selbstbezichtigung (pr., pb. 1966; Self-Accusation, 1969), one speaker confesses to the audience, but, as in Offending the Audience, he or she ends up emphasizing how character was and is created by language. Both “speak-ins” are at least “prologues” to Kaspar (pr., pb. 1968; English translation, 1969). Based on the famous case of an adult who had been reared alone, without hearing or learning speech, and then left in the care of town authorities, Kaspar analyzes and criticizes the ways in which society (re-) constitutes human character through its education of this “blank mind.”

Peter Handke’s concerns with the operations of language in cultural and individual character formation are often linked to the work of modern linguistic philosophers Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein and to the theories of structuralists and deconstructionists. Both of the latter groups are concerned with the tradition-bound relationships between words and meaning and how the interrelationships of words in sequence (syntax) alter their meaning. Deconstructionists, such as Jacques Derrida, have stressed the need to demystify language, to strip it of its hidden transcendental meanings. Handke’s attempt to deny, for at least one night, the power of dramatic language to evoke another world seems similarly deconstructive.

Sources for Further Study

Barry, Thomas. “Postmodern Longings for the Static Moment: On Recent Peter Handke Criticism.” German Quarterly, Winter, 1987, 88-98.

Berman, Jaye. “Offending the Audience: A Dramatic Example of Postmodern Parabasis.” Antithesis 1, no. 1 (1987): 93-100.

DeMeritt, Linda C. New Subjectivity and Prose Forms of Alienation: Peter Handke and Botho Strauss. New York: P. Lang, 1987.

Firda, Richard A. Peter Handke. Boston: Twayne, 1993.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, and James Knowlton. Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation: The Goalie’s Journey Home. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983.

Ran-Mosely, Faye. The Tragicomic Passion: Clowns, Fools, and Madmen in Drama, Film, and Literature. New York: Lang, 1994.

Schlueter, June. The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.