The Visit

The Visit brings the richest woman in the world back to the bankrupt town she grew up in. The townspeople line up to welcome her, hoping for rescue. She offers them an enormous sum, on one condition: someone has to kill the man who ruined her when she was seventeen.

That man is Alfred Ill, the shopkeeper everybody likes, the one chosen to charm her precisely because they were once lovers. At first the town is appalled and says so loudly. Then the shopping starts, on credit, and nobody can quite say who is going to settle the bill. Ill watches his neighbours acquire new shoes and works out, slowly, what is being decided around him.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote the play in 1956, and the English-language version most often staged is Maurice Valency's adaptation. Dürrenmatt called the piece a tragic comedy, and the grotesque arrives with the laughter: a retinue of strange attendants, a woman partly rebuilt from prosthetics, a coffin unloaded before anyone has admitted it will be needed.

The horror is procedural. Nobody commits a crime; a community simply talks itself round, item by item, until the unthinkable has become a formality. It is very funny until it is not, and its argument about the way money reshapes conscience has not aged at all.

The Visit is for audiences who like satire cold and precise. It asks a question every person in the room answers privately, and nobody comes out of it feeling entirely comfortable.