[In the following review, Mueller praises Dürrenmatt, but is disappointed by Achterloo.]

How I greeted the opportunity to review a new Dürrenmatt play when I first unpacked Achterloo. As a long-time friend of his story Der Richter und sein Henker (which I have taught so often I know entire passages by heart) and the plays Der Besuch der alten Dame and Die Physiker, I was delighted to receive the playwright's latest work and to have a chance to proclaim its worth. After reading the play, I realize that it is not only I who has aged in teaching German literature; it appears that the creators of contemporary German classics have also aged. Dürrenmatt, it seems, is not what he used to be. This potpourri of characters from and allusions to history and the playwright's own earlier plays does not achieve the coherence of before.

Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade and Dürrenmatt's own Physiker seem to have provided the inspiration to write this play, for in the closing lines we discover that the events have occurred in an insane asylum and that the actors were inmates of the asylum. In Achterloo Dürrenmatt continues the demythologizing and deheroicizing of important historical personages that he began in "Das Sterben der Pythia." Here Napoleon, Richelieu, Benjamin Franklin, Jan Hus and Karl Marx appear at various points in the play and speak of contemporary phenomena such as nuclear war, the confrontation between East and West and capitalism and communism. In his last major play, Der Mitmacher, Dürrenmatt felt compelled to write a "Nachwort" that is longer than the play itself, in at attempt to justify his play and to rationalize its failure. Would that he had written an afterword for this play also, so that we might have some idea of his intent. The setting gives us a clue to one aspect of that intent: "Achterloo in Achterloo somewhere near Waterloo." Dürrenmatt is manipulating historical reality to show us that this is a completely imaginary locale with completely imaginary characters. Interwoven into the dialogue are real and imaginary speeches by historical and fictional characters: for example, Robespierre's famous address to the French Assembly which sent Louis XVI to the guillotine is quoted, and lines from Büchner's Woyzeck appear in Woyzeck's conversation with Napoleon.

Shakespeare said that all the world is a stage; Dürrenmatt seems to be saying the stage is all the world. He arbitrarily brings historical personages onto his stage to show us a microcosm of today's world. In the end, Marion, Woyzeck's daughter, emerges as the heroine when she murders Napoleon with her father's razor. Yet it was Napoleon's stated aim to keep the world off-balance by not attacking or starting an international conflict that might widen to a world war. Does this mean that the whore of the world—Marion has slept with all the major figures in the world's history—is dooming us to self-destruction? Would that Dürrenmatt had given us an answer.