Spengler Redux

By T. E. Kalem

THE RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE by PETER HANDKE It is difficult to say what this play means, but relatively easy to tell you how to write it. Rip out pages from lonesco, Pinter, Beckett, Kafka, the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein and Alice in Wonderland. Tear these into tiny fragments and scatter them on the stage. Austrian Playwright Peter Handke, 29, is a derivative word-vandal. He is currently quite the vogue in Europe, which suggests that the decline of the West is progressing more rapidly than Spengler envisioned.

The play's two principal figures have a Doppelgaenger relationship. Each is the split image of the other. Since the exercise of power and authority is one of the few remotely coherent themes, the two men may represent the eerie bond between Germany and Hitler. Otherwise, the evening is one interminable non sequitur.

However, the play clearly points up the three minimal demands that we must begin making of the avant-garde playwright. Does he have something new to tell us? Is his theatricality so exciting as to justify telling us nothing? Does he extend the forms of drama? If all the answers are no, as in Handke's case, he should be accorded no more attention than a purveyor of fake antiques. In reality, such a playwright is insulting the audience--what the Germans call Publikumsbeschimpfung. That was the title of an earlier Handke play in which four actors simply revile the audience. Slightly more subtly, he's done it again.

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