Offending the Audience

Offending the Audience is a play by Austrian writer Peter Handke. It is sometimes called an "anti-play" because of its renouncements of theatricality. It was originally published in German under the title Publikumsbeschimpfung (which better translates as "Insulting the Audience") in 1966. It premiered in June 1966 at the Theatre am Turm in Frankfurt, Germany as part of the "Experimental Theatre Week." The play was first produced in London in 1970 at the Almost Free Theatre in Soho by the Interaction Arts Cooperative's TOC (The Other Company) directed by the Israeli writer and theatre director, Naftali Yavin, the cast included Andrew Norton, Judy Monahan and Jan Chappell.

In a 1970 interview Handke said that the idea behind his plays was "making people aware of the world of the theatre--not of the outside world." He goes on to say that specifically in the case of Offending the Audience, his "point was to use words to encircle the audience so they'd want to free themselves by heckling; they might feel naked and get involved." He further goes on to explain his intentions:

The idea was to have the spectators in the orchestra thrown back upon themselves. What mattered to me was making them feel like going to the theatre more, making them see all plays more consciously and with a different consciousness. My theatrical plan is to have the audience always look upon my play as a means of testing other plays. I first intended to write an essay, a pamphlet, against the theatre, but then I realized that a paperback isn't an effective way to publish an anti-theatre statement. And so the outcome was, paradoxically, doing something onstage against the stage, using the theatre to protest against the theatre of the moment--I don't mean theatre as such, the Absolute, I mean theatre as a historical phenomenon, as it is to this day.

In Offending the Audience there is no plot. No story is being told at all. Instead, the audience is made aware that what they see is not a representation of anything else, but is in fact quite literal. The actors continuously repeat the point that this is not a play, and that nothing theatrical will happen.
The first lines of the performance are "You are welcome. This piece is a prologue." A prologue, that is, to all future theatrical performances.

Handke used this rejection of traditional play structure to reinforce his anti-theatre intention. His point was to get the audience to consider what exactly theatre does, in particular, the role of language in the theatre.

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