In every story, there has to be a secret

As a young author, Tankred Dorst felt like the lord of his stories. He once told me about Peter Zadek, who staged one of his plays in 1962: When Zadek picked him up from the airport and drove him to rehearsal, the author asked the director whether he had changed the text. “Yes,” Zadek answered, “I particularly had to make many cuts in the long monologue you wrote.” – “What do you mean, ‚cuts‘?…” – “About every fifth sentence has been cut from the monologue!” Dorst did not reply. He braced himself for a catastrophe. The big surprise came later in the theatre, where he discovered that the shortened monologue was much more dramatic than before. More expressive. Even more sincere. The deleted sentences made the monologue more conflicting, darker, because it implied things left unspoken. In every story, there has to be a secret. Gaps, jumps, things left unsaid. It has to leave room for the audience‘s imagination.

Translated into English by Lynnette Polcyn