Biography: A Game

Cast: Bogdan Koca (Professor Kurmann), Inga Romantsova (Antoinette), Slava Orel (Recorder) with Jill Webster and Pawel Koca, Voices: Jennifer Claire, Katherine Giovenali, Brett Hilder, Patryk Koca, Niki Owen, Anthony Phelan and Jill Webster.

The play, Biography: A Game examines the result of the protagonist's wish to break out of the deadening round of his life to find some form of individual freedom. The protagonist, Herr Kurmann, is a great intellectual and a modest nonconformist. He reads books, knows who Wittgenstein is, plays chess and smokes a pipe. He is a serious scholar and he knows everything about human behaviour. His behavioural studies were so successful that he even became a professor. Herr Professor Kurmann believes that our biographies are absolutely accidental and could have been altered had we acted differently sometime in the past.
"Biography!" he says with an ironic smile, "I refuse to believe that our biography, mine or any other, couldn't look different. I only need to act differently one single timeÂ…"
Biography: A Game is an imaginary experiment where Herr Professor Kurmann is given a chance to make a different choice in any moment of his past life. What reality does not permit, the theatre permits: to change, to begin again, to try out another biography. And while Herr Professor Kurmann staggers through the labyrinth of memories, he gradually realises that he is simply trying to find out what exactly made his life so miserable.
The playwright, Max Frisch is one of the most intriguing figures of 20th Century German Literature. Being of Swiss origin, the neutrality of his nation made him more or less an outside spectator who was not directly involved in Europe's atrocities and struggles during his lifetime. He was one of the few in the German-speaking literary and theatre scene not spoiled by National Socialism.
Max Frisch consciously followed the troubling events that shook our century, events which impacted deeply on his art. Recurring themes in his works are identity, guilt and innocence, self-image and the problems that come up when we form images of others and see them only through this narrow channel. He aims at self-recognition, not promoting an ideology, a quality which means his work lacks the annoyingly permanent raised finger that is characteristic for other authors such as Bertolt Brecht, whose ideas of epic theatre influenced him greatly.
In his plays, Frisch does not present the audience with a version of the world that pretends to be objective - he believes that reality evolves in the mind and imagination of every individual. All that the playwright can thus hope for is to substitute this story that we deem reality. It is only in this sense, as a "change of ideas" that real change is possible.