Brutally we are thrown into hell of the middle classes, centred round the dominant Hausfrau who expects her youngest son – against his will – to marry the fat, rustic girl Maria. Allied with the local vicar whose temporal views on religion not allow spilt juices, Jonigk provides a rare seen grotesque tragedy about group pressure, fear of death, stables, sociological studies and electrical knives. The human being is described as a biological animal that instinctively lives in a divided hierarchy of sex. The male characters describe themselves as being divine while the female character only see her raison d’être by virtue of her womb. By playing with words and language structures and picturing the rituals of the figures, Jonigk makes his physical and social deformations of the figures visible. The slightly caricatured figures, the tough style, the sexual thing and the theme concerning the battle of each individual against the ruler, are produced with irony which seldom is seen in modern drama.
