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The Visit

A returned millionairess offers her naïve town affluence in exchange for justice, revealing the horrific universality of human weakness and greed.

Benedict Nightingale - The Times, February 1991

'This brings to the National the wandering mummers who, though English speaking, quaintly call themselves the Theatre de Complicite and are noted for a physical chutzpah rarely associated with performers this side of the Channel. Their choice of play may, then, surprise those who remember the sober, even sombre production of The Visit received when the Lunts performed it in the late 1950s. Yet Friedrich Dürrenmatt, its author, called it a comedy and said that "heavy seriousness" was above all to be avoided by its actors. Complicite has certainly heeded his words. ...' More

Michael Ratcliffe - programme note for The Visit at the National Theatre, London, 1991

'In 1989, with Frederich Durrenmatt's The Visit, a revenger's comedy and masterpiece of post-war European theatre, Complicite tackled the finite text of an established writer for the first time. It was an inspired choice. The Visit is also a comedy of survival, the survival of the bourgeoisie who come through on reserves of infinite corruptibility rather than the energies of desperation that inspire the working class. Complicite's total respect for it was almost as startling as the violent physical language which they developed to visualise and reinforce its harsh, ironic power. Complicite have lived with the play, on and off, for more than three years, modifying, changing and intensifying their dark comic vision of it with each revival, just as material is added to their wholly devised shows from all manner of sources in a kind of theatrical collage. The collage is never undisciplined, abstract or divorced from life itself: everything Complicite actors do is rooted in what they have heard and seen. This is a theatre of observation, of bodily impulses, of class-defences and universal desires. Its logic is merciless, its techniques virtuoso, its energy without bounds. It is rude and funny and fearful, for inside the vortex of frenzy the individual is always alone.'

Opened November 1989 at Almeida Theatre, London, as part of Complicite’s Almeida Season. Revived for the National Theatre’s Lyttleton Theatre, London in 1991 then toured nationally and to Zurich, Hong Kong and Australia.