Franz Xaver Kroetz, an unscrupulous depiction of reality
The Bavarian playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz, who wrote the play The Trail, is known for his harsh realism and terse dialogue. Kroetz's play Riistapolku, which represents Kroetz's early production, is a prime example of the themes and themes that have raised him to world fame.
Playwright Franz Xaver Kroetz was born in Munich in 1946. She studied acting, but before her career in theatre, she worked as a truck driver, gardener and in the care sector, among other things. Kroetz’s first play text is Oblomov, based on the novel by Ivan Goncharov from 1968.
In 1971, Kroetz joined the German Communist Party (Deutsche Kommunistische Partei). Reflections of Kroetz’s party affiliation can be seen in his plays, which often criticize materialism and the position of the working class in a society experiencing a post-war boom. Kroetz resigned from the party in 1980. In the middle of the same decade, he said that he had lost faith in the theatre’s ability to change society – he commented that theatre hits the face of a society permeated by violence rather than a hard fist as a cuddly honeycomb.
In the late 1980s, Kroetz became known for his role as a sensational journalist in the popular television series Kir Royal. He has also acted in several of his own plays and directed them for stage, television and radio. In addition to plays, Kroetz has written novels and poetry. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Bertolt Brecht Prize for Literature and the Bundesverdienstkreuz from the German state.
Today, Kroetz lives part of the year in Germany and part of the year in Tenerife. Kroetz and his ex-wife, actress and writer Marie Theres Kroetz-Relin, have three children. Daughter Josephine Kroetz is also pursuing a career as an actress.
Short lines and violent events
Franz Xaver Kroetz’s production includes more than 60 plays. He wrote most actively in the 1970s, and almost half of his plays premiered before 1980.
The tradition of German folk plays is an important inspiration for Kroetz. The characters in Kroetz’s naturalistic or even disgustingly realistic plays represent the working class and the lower middle class. A typical theme of the plays is the profound misfortune in the lives of people of these classes.
Back Stage critic Dan Isaac describes the existence of Kroetz’s characters as “so insignificant that suicide would be a happy ending for them.”
Kroetz uses language deliberately restrictively. The plays speak the Bavarian dialect, and when the characters’ vocabulary is not enough to express their feelings, they often resort to violence. Many of the plays are like series of snapshots, in which the lives of the main characters are often presented through painfully accurately depicted everyday routines.
Kroetz depicts violence and sexuality in his plays without beating around the bush or softening them. At the time of their premieres, the plays provoked strong reactions: the Münchner Kammerspiele had to be guarded by police after hard-line Catholics were upset about Kroetz’s works on masturbation, abortion and infanticide, and an Austrian high school teacher was fired without warning after including in his curriculum the play Stallerhof, which tells the story of the relationship between a teenage girl with an intellectual disability and a man decades her senior.
Kroetz’s most famous works include Stallerhof, Das Nest, which deals with blind obedience and greed’s relationship with the environment, and What’s up, Meier (Mensch Meier), which explores the impact of capitalism on the life of a nuclear family.
Kroetz made his breakthrough in the United States with the wordless monologue Request Concert (Wunschkonzert), which depicts a lonely evening of a middle-aged woman and has been performed all over the world, including in Finland as a Polish visit to the Tampere Theatre Festival. About half of Kroetz’s plays have been translated into English, and they have also been performed by theatres in the French-speaking world, the Nordic countries and Estonia. Eight of Kroetz’s plays have been translated into Finnish, but they are not often performed in Finnish theatres.
Game Trail based on real events
This song contains plot reveals!
The Game Trail (Wildwechsel) premiered at the Stadttische Bühnen Dortmund Theatre in 1971. The play features several elements that recur in Kroetz’s work, such as brief dialogue, an unconventional sexual relationship, unwanted pregnancy and the use of violence.
The Game Trail is based on real events. The play was inspired by a 1967 criminal case in a small town in northwest Germany, in which a 13-year-old girl and a 19-year-old man who sexually abused her beat the girl’s father to death with a rifle. Premiered just four years after the actual crime, the play faithfully follows real-life events.
Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted The Trail of Wildlife into a TV movie in 1972. The film adaptation was not to Kroetz’s liking – in fact, he sued Fassbinder for adding new, sensationalist and pornographic scenes to the work, such as a close-up of a penis. Actress Eva Mattes , who played Hanni, won the 1973 Deutscher Filmpreis Award for Best Actress for her roles in two of Fassbinder’s films, one of which was Wildpath.
The Game Trail is one of Kroetz’s earliest plays. It has not been shown as often as the author’s best-known works, and the film has also remained a cult classic in small circles. Prior to the Helsinki City Theatre’s production, Riistapolku has been seen in Finnish professional theatres twice, as a production by the Tampere Theatre’s Black Love group in 1990 and at the Kouvola Theatre in 2003.
Siiri Liitiä