Quartet (Müller)

Quartet is a play written by the (formerly East) German playwright Heiner Müller. The play was written in 1980.

Its subject matter rendered it unlikely for production under the GDR's repressive cultural policies, but Müller's status as the nation's most eminent playwright after the death of Berthold Brecht allowed him great leeway for travel, and so when the progressive director of the prestigious Schauspielhaus Bochum offered him and his director B. K. Tragelehn the chance to premier the work there, the GDR's cultural czars offered no objection. The casting was stellar: despite the profusion of eminent actors in the Bochum company, one of the leading actresses of the even more eminent Berliner Schaubühne Libgart Schwarz was asked to play "Merteuil" to the "Valmont" of the peripatetic Fassbinder collaborator Fritz Schediwy.

The play is in Müller's highly laconic late style: there no stage directions; punctuation is sparse, giving the text a bald, telegraphic affect despite the elaborate rhetoric of the often long speeches. No setting or time period are mentioned in the text, although the Bochum program book does offer the rubric "Time/place: salon before the French Revolution/bunker after the III World War". The undescribed "action" of the play compresses the main plot turns of Choderlos de Laclos' 1782 novel in letters Les liaisons dangereuses into a little more than an hour of "theater games" in which the two performers take turns playing Laclos' characters of weary rouė, scheming adulteress, virtuous wife, and innocent virgin. (Although the roles are usually played by man and woman, other productions have chosen to cast same-sex couples. or even an operatic version for single performer.

Despite its challenges to performers (and audiences), the play's strange balance between austerity and flamboyance has rendered it much the most performed of Müller's plays. The almost unlimited interpretive freedom offered by the text has made the work a favorite of adventurous and radical directors (among them Michael Haneke and Robert Wilson) while the virtuosity of the roles, combined with the lurid language and vivid imagery, has made the piece a party-piece for star performers, particularly in one-shot festival settings.

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