1. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), p. 152.Google Scholar

2. Cf. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4. 1212Google Scholar: ‘What can be shown, cannot be said’. The notion that a performance, a style of acting or directing has an intention does not imply the attribution of a psychological state or a resolve to communicate. See Nordmann, Alfred, ‘The Actors' Brief: Experiences with Chekhov’, Theatre Research International, Volume 19, Number 2, Summer 1994, pp. 134–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. The play was published in Theatre, Volume 24, 1993, pp. 93–105 along with an introductory essay ‘Seeing Through the Eyes of the Word’ by its translator Honegger, Gitta, pp. 87–92Google Scholar. The play's title might also be rendered as ‘The hour at which we were unknown to one another’. We shall refer to it simply as The Hour.

4. The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld (New York: Seabury Press, 1974).

5. His most recent film Die Abwesenheit (Absence, 1993) has not been released in the English-speaking world. It stars Jeanne Moreau and Bruno Ganz.

6. Cf., for example, Handke, 's ‘journal’ Weight of the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, c1984)Google Scholar. Handke did not write for the theatre during that period. Indeed, only Die Unvernünftigen sterben aus (They Are Dying Out, 1974) could serve as, albeit highly ironic, testimony to Handke's ‘subjectivism’. For a comparison and contrast of Handke and Strauβ, see Alfred Nordmann ‘Blotting and the Line of Beauty: On Performances by Botho Strauβ and Peter Handke’, forthcoming in Modern Drama.

7. That series began with Die Lehre der Sainte-Victoire (1980), it later included Die Geschichte des Bleistifts, Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers, and, of course, Versuch über die Müdigkeit, Versuch über die Jukebox, and Versuch über den geglückten Tag, the latter three in The Jukebox and Other Essays on Storytelling (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994).

8. Op.cit. (note 3), p. 103.

9. In German, Handke's first sentence reads ‘Die Bühne ist ein freier Platz im hellen Licht’. ‘Freier Platz’ can be translated as ‘free space’, ‘empty place’, or ‘open (town) square’.

10. Op.cit. (note 3), p. 98.

11. The German ‘Liebhaber’ is either a dilettante or a lover in the singular, if not sexual sense (people in love are ‘Liebende’, but a woman might refer to someone with whom she has sexual relations as her ‘Liebhaber’).

12. The sets for all three productions intimated town squares surrounded by buildings. For reviews of these stagings, see Theater heute, May 1993, pp. 4 ff., and April 1994, pp. 5 ff.

13. Wickert's dramaturg was Michael Börgerding. Alfred Nordmann saw four performances in May and June of 1994.

14. This ‘concrete theatre’ is a descendant of Handke's early ‘concrete poetry’. For an account of its viability in other contexts, see Alfred Nordmann and Hartmut Wickert, ‘Shamanism Vilified and Redeemed: Sam Shepard's States of Shock’, forthcoming in Contemporary Theatre Review Nordmann, Alfred, ‘Political Theater as Experimental Anthropology: On a Production of Heinrich von Kleist's Prinz Friedrich von Hamburg’, New German Critique, number 66, Fall 1995, pp. 17–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Alfred Nordmann and Hartmut Wickert, ‘Ende der Kritik, Beginn der Aufklärung: Aufführungsästhetische Reflektionen am Beispiel des Dokumentartheaters’ (typescript).

15. Two critics compared Wickert's production to the magical approach adopted by Peymann, Gosch, and Bondy. Rainer Wagner complains in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 April 1994, that the Hannover production did not provide another light-heartedly animated and magically playful Mediterranean study of people on the square. Instead ‘there remained only a working out (Abarbeiten) of roles and costumes’. Rather than watching actors we should always ‘be able to guess at the mini-drama which is currently taking place’. Jens Fischer evaluates this contrast differently. He notes in the Weser Kurier, 25 April 1994, that the ‘rigorously musical staging’ in Hannover does not imitate life but creates theatre art: ‘Wickert succeeds to rid Handke's play without questions from pre-fabricated answers without rendering it banal’.

16. It is therefore not an oracle of Wittgenstein's either, see the epigraph of this article, op.cit. (note 3), p. 93, and Handke, Peter in an interview with Theater heuteGoogle Scholar in its yearbook Theater 1992.

17. Op.cit. (note 3), p. 93.

18. According to Michel de Certeau, the spatial practices of pedestrians insinuate an ‘opaque, blind domain of the inhabited city […] into the clear text of the planned, readable city’. The city, like the stage, prescribes certain trajectories which tell us meaningful ways of getting from here to there. ‘The act of walking is to the urban system [and its trajectories] what the act of speaking [and writing?], the speech act, is to language […] Walking affirms, suspects, guesses, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it “speaks”’.Spaces are thus (in)habitable to the extent that walking first of all remembers these trajectories. de Certeau, Michel, ‘Practices of Space’ Blonsky, Marshall, ed., On Signs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 122–45, esp. pp. 126–32.Google Scholar

19. Theater heute, January 1994, pp. 14–8, cf. 15 and 18.

20. Op.cit., note 18, p. 124.

21. Ibid., p. 126.

22. ‘Noch einmal für Jugoslawien’, in Handke, Peter, Langsam im Schatten (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), pp. 199 ffGoogle Scholar. Handke wrote numerous reminders of an innocence lost in Yugoslavia. He holds that this was further aggravated by attempts of the international press to divide the warring parties into good and evil with the help of labels like ‘criminals’, ‘massacres’, and so on. Handke, 's recent essay Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina odei Geiechtigkeit für Seibien (Justice for Serbia) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996)Google Scholar was meant to help us return from a state of accusation and condemnation into a state of wonder and exploration, an investigation of causes, and an admission that we know nothing of each other. Since Handke's text is also a defence of Serbia, it created a major literary scandal in the German press.

23. Op.cit. (note 3), p. 104: ‘As they scatter in all directions it is clear to see how one exits with angry disappointment, sticking out his tongue, spitting; another with cheerful disappointment, shrugging his shoulders; some rather relieved to have escaped the dream; others still moving in it; this one cries out, this one laughs; one kisses the ground as he moves on; another, also moving on, maps out his path in the air like a slalom skier before the start; one needs a regular running start…’

24. Ibid., p. 105: ‘And now, down below, the First Spectator tears himself from his seat […’ Coming and going, coming and going. Then darkness fell on the square’. The Hannover production did not ‘plant’ actors as spectators in the audience. And yet, during at least one performance a spectator entered the stage. Instead of exiting with the actors at the end of the play, his silent walk earlier on, from left to right in the very front of the stage, brought a sense of completion and consummation to the staging. His movement ‘spoke’ the one trajectory that otherwise remained unspoken during the performance, it therefore went unnoticed by most actors and spectators.

25. Scheduler, Richard, ‘The Street is the Stage’, chapter 3 of his The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (London: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar. Schechner analyses the democracy movement in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, breaching the Berlin Wall, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in Washington, the Mardi Gras of New Orleans and the Gasparilla celebration of Tampa, Spring Break in Daytona Beach, and a north Indian ritual drama, Ramlila of Ramnagar.

26. Op.cit. (note 18), p. 124.

27. This ‘episodic moral law’ appears in Handke, 's Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), p. 567.Google Scholar

28. Handke's text includes numerous pauses: ‘Pause. The open square in bright light. […] Pause. The empty square in the light. […] The big open square in bright light, nothing else’ (op.cit., note 3, pp. 94–6).

29. Op.cit. (note 27), p. 566.

30. Cf. the notion of ‘exemplification' [e.g. of a pattern] in Goodman, Nelson's Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), p. 65Google Scholar. It would be wrong to assume, Goodman argues for the case of painting, ‘that representation and expression are the only symbolic functions that paintings may perform, in supposing that what a symbol symbolizes is always outside it, and in insisting that what counts in a painting is the mere possession rather than the exemplification of certain properties’.

31. We conceptualize theatre on the model of writing and reading in contrast to speaking and hearing: instead of projecting and communicating a message or an intention, actors perform acts of writing; instead of passively listening or guessing at a message to be received, the audience is actively engaged in a creative and constructive act of reading. For the relevant differences between spoken and written text, see, for example, Ricœur, Paul, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 198–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the purposes of our discussion it does no matter whether the actors' writing produces the performance as a unique sign (semiosis) or whether it involves a readable semiotic code of conventional theatrical practices. Also, we do not suppose that the writing of actors is simultaneously the reading of a literary text, for example, by Peter Handke. This sets our approach apart from Cole, David's proposals in Acting as Reading: The Place of the Reading Process in the Actor's Work (Ann ArborUniversity of Michigan Press, 1992).Google Scholar