About the work
Thomas Bernhard's „Ritter, Dene, Voss" was premiered in 1986 at the Salzburg Festival under Claus Peymann. The play was written for the three actors of the Burgtheater Vienna — Ilse Ritter, Kirsten Dene and Gert Voss — whose names form the title. The work is one of Bernhard's most successful family plays.
Plot
In the bourgeois villa of a wealthy intellectual family, two sisters — Ritter and Dene — wait for their brother, who today is to be released from a psychiatric institution and brought home. The family had him committed years ago because he, a brilliant philosophy professor, had attempted suicide. Dene, the older sister, has spent her life caring for him and is convinced he can only be healed at home. Ritter, the younger, is sceptical and bitter. They argue about the appropriate menu, the tablecloth, his favourite glass — every domestic detail becomes the stage of a power struggle. Then Voss arrives — the brother. He is exhausted, brilliant, vicious, philosophically eloquent. He insults his sisters, refuses the food, drinks excessively, mocks his late father (whose portrait hangs in the room and whom he eventually destroys). Voss collapses physically; the sisters must carry him to bed. The play ends in the same atmospheric stasis with which it began.
Cultural significance
Ritter, Dene, Voss is one of Bernhard's most-performed plays and an icon of the German-language family-drama tradition (alongside the works of Ödön von Horváth and Werner Schwab). Bernhard's tirading-monologue prose, his philosophical brilliance and his rage against bourgeois Austria find here their stage equivalent. Performances at the Burgtheater Vienna under Peymann and the original cast are theatre-historical reference.