Biography A Game

Middle-aged behavioural researcher Kurmann is given the chance to start over with his life at any given point and `correct` any previous choices he made-from his failed marriage, his lack of political conviction and his successful academic career, to his poor attention to health and the colour of his living-room furniture. Yet, despite his intention to apply whatever wisdom he acquired, Kurmann finds himself inexorably trapped by the same decisions. Ultimately proving fatal, Kurmann`s life `game` interrogates how much of our own path is shaped by other, seemingly random factors and how much is in fact predetermined by our own limited, conditioned selves. The play`s central idea that our lives are nothing but a self-conscious play with imaginary identities is brilliantly captured in Biography`s dramaturgical form that sets up a theatre rehearsal as the metaphor for the game of life with its seemingly endless possibilities and variables. Frisch`s own revised, dramatically heightened version of his play from 1967 celebrates not only the theatre as a form of self-expression by subtly revealing the construction of its identification processes-it also celebrates the human condition in all its potential and shortcomings as it showcases both comedy and tragic outcome that define all human life.