About the work
Thomas Bernhard's play was premiered in 1972 at the Salzburg Festival — one of those festival provocations that made Bernhard notorious. The premiere caused a scandal when Bernhard insisted on the blackout of the auditorium during the final scene, as called for in the text, which violated fire-safety regulations. The second performance was cancelled, and Bernhard withdrew the play from Salzburg.
Plot
After a performance of the "Queen of the Night" in Mozart's Magic Flute, the legendary coloratura soprano, her old, blind father and the Doctor — a cynical diagnostician and monologist — meet in the dressing room. While the singer changes, exhausted, the Doctor delivers an hours-long monologue on decay, the dissecting table and transience. The father listens. The figures are trapped in their own language, in art as a substitute religion, and cannot free themselves. The play ends in an almost ritual closing ceremony.
Cultural significance
Der Ignorant und der Wahnsinnige is Bernhard's first major theatre work after years as a novelist and fixes the style that would define his drama: long monologues, musically structured language, a deliberate divergence between physical presence and verbal mass. Claus Peymann, who directed the premiere, became Bernhard's most important theatre director for decades. The play is regarded as the prototype of the Bernhard style that Ritter, Dene, Voss and Heldenplatz would later perfect.