THE VISIT
“I’ll even attack you or eat you whole / Down in the dark my bone mills roll / Porridge for my porridge bowl.” –from “The Minotaur’s Song” by Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band
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A satirical fable written in 1956, The Visit constructs a mechanism, a sort of mousetrap for catching humanity at its self-serving worst. Well, a billionairess by the name of Claire Zachanassian does the actual construction: returning to her little hometown of Guellen after decades spent nurturing her rage along with her fortune, Madame Claire offers the townsfolk a billion dollars–if only they’ll agree to murder their leading and most beloved citizen, Anton Schill, who knocked her up and betrayed her in his randy youth.
The Guellenites are appropriately indignant over Madame Claire’s grotesque offer, but they’re also peculiarly vulnerable to it: While the rest of the country enjoys great prosperity, their factories have been shut down. Nobody’s working. The trains don’t bother stopping at the Guellen station anymore. So even though their moral sense says No, no, no to Madame Claire, the townsfolk’s coarse bread and tatty clothes are telling them, Don’t be an idiot.
Josef Sommer is disconcertingly laid back, on the other hand, as the object of all that implacability. His Schill displays an equanimity that makes his hypocrisy seem all the more slimy in the beginning, his resignation all the more haunting at the end. Linda Stephens, Colin Stinton, and Steve Pickering are all exceedingly creepy as various types of turning worms.
