The Mountain King and the Misanthrope (1828)

Drawn by Johann Christian Scholler; engraved by Zinke, c1829.  Laurence Senelick Collection. By Ferdinand Raimund Translated from German by Michael McDowell and Laurence Senelick The Zauberposse or magical farce was a dramatic form peculiar to Austria and especially Vienna in the latest eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  A baroque genre that made its appeal to…

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By Bernhard Studlar
Translated by Henning Bochert

One hundred ‘apps’ (like the numbers in Greenaway’s film) throughout the play lead from nowhere to nowhere (but not to anyone being drowned), there are no characters doing anything, and no meaning coagulates around any plot. Even the narrator disappears, and all that remains – as the playwright points out in his preface – is text.