Der Besuch der alten Dame

An elderly billionairess, Claire Zachanassian, returns to her impoverished home town of Güllen decades after being driven out in disgrace. She offers the town a fortune — on the condition that they kill the man who wronged her. As the townspeople's outrage gives way to rationalization, Dürrenmatt's tragicomedy stages a slow moral collapse dressed as civic celebration. First performed in 1956, the play is a landmark of postwar German-language theatre and a study of how prosperity can be bought with complicity.