[In the following review, Bachem provides a mixed assessment of Force of Habit.]

In his earlier play Die Jagdgesellschaft Thomas Bernhard had already commented that we never know what is a comedy and what a tragedy. Certainly this is true of Die Macht der Gewohnheit (Force of Habit), which is superficially designated as a comedy. But what could be comical about a three-act play featuring an aging circus director, a vain juggler, an obscene lion tamer, a silly clown whose only routine seems to be to let his cap slip off his head and catch it again, and the director’s equally silly granddaughter. The comedy is merely external, due to the presence of stock comic characters in a stock comic setting.

The action is at best ludicrous: for years the director Caribaldi has been obsessed with the idea of practicing Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet. As the title suggests, rehearsals, if one may call them that, are eternally carried on, but the group never plays together. One hears a sequence of long and deep notes from one of Caribaldi’s celli—he has three—and an occasional pizzicato from a violin. Caribaldi has forced four of his employees to take up instruments which they hate to play; in fact he himself hates his instrument, but some time ago a doctor recommended cello-playing as a therapeutic routine. The lion tamer is forever eating huge radishes which he stores inside the piano. Little wonder that the instrument stinks. Once the lion tamer even had an axe poised to demolish the piano. The juggler is forever waving a spurious job offer from a competing circus, threatening to quit Caribaldi’s outfit. But no one has the courage to quit or at least not to play.

Gradually the real intent of Bernhard’s “comedy” clarifies itself. The megalomaniac Caribaldi, who suffers from constant backaches and hobbles around on a wooden leg, only mouths his slogans “precision, consistency, concentration.” They are artificial values for him. He intensely desires them, but they are not an organic part of his being, not even in nuce; they are willed, but the distance is too great. His continued non-success is thus assured. The juggler provides us with one of the insights (?) of the play: “The sick and the crippled reign over the world: Everything is ruled by the sick and the crippled. It’s a comedy, an evil humiliation.” Only the words for great ideas or emotions remain. No one can personify them, no one can “fill them out.” The words are like empty shells, library categories, respected but benignly neglected. In this vein the word “Casals” is uttered again and again by Caribaldi, but it carries no meaning; it is simply and only a word. What is real is brutality, stupidity (represented by the lion tamer), ridiculousness (the granddaughter and the clown) and vanity and delusion (the juggler and Caribaldi himself). In short: “Everything disgusting / Everything that happens / happens disgustingly / Life existence / disgusting …” Or: “We don’t want life / but it must be lived.”

As reading material, the play could easily be dismissed. But the language of Thomas Bernhard possesses considerable force, and a successful staging of this play would produce a very unsettling theatrical experience.