The city has been plagued by arsonists for some time. Posing as peddlers, they enter houses, set up in the attic and soon set them on fire. This out-of-control situation in the city is particularly infuriating for Mr Byderman, a wealthy businessman. Smoking a cigar and sipping red wine in the living room of his luxurious home, he resents a newspaper report of another arson attack, which is like the previous one in that a kind-hearted merchant once again takes up residence in the attic and starts a fire. Byderman frowns on this carelessness and declares that the arsonists who are caught "should be hanged immediately". Just at that moment, the maid informs him that the merchant has arrived and is anxious to see Mr Byderman. The stranger, who claims to be a homeless wrestler called Schmitz, persuades Mr Byderman to take in the newcomer for at least one night, by flattering him and appealing to the businessman's humanity ... From that moment on, the action picks up at an uncontrollable pace. Before Byderman and his wife Babette know it, a second "guest" has taken up residence in their house, the attic is filled with petrol drums and the newcomers no longer even hide the fact that they are arsonists. But Byderman denies it until the last moment and does not want to see what is really going on in his house. In Byderman's hands, matches... Will he be able to stop what he has done with his own help at the decisive moment? What are the reasons that make us behave in such a way that we become accomplices in our own downfall?
Byderman and the Arsonists (1958), a play by the famous Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch, is classified as an absurdist play. The play, which has not lost its relevance to date, is a comedy in the guise of a comedy, which deals with the fundamental conflict between security and freedom, raises issues of justice and the responsibility of the intelligentsia, and criticises the behavioural patterns of society. This 20th century classic invites us to rethink how little our efforts to live a quality life matter when others want us to have none. According to the play's director, Gildo Aleksa, in the minds of contemporary Europeans, this play evokes a fundamental and long-delayed narrative, which includes the belief that disasters happen to others, somewhere else, while the biggest pest is right here in the 'attic', or 'outside the door'. This constant collective denial, which is typical of Lithuania and Western society, is very reminiscent of the Biedermanesque effort to lie to oneself and not to divide everything into black and white.
Byderman's name is a playful combination of the German words "bieder" (worthy, honest) and "Mann" (man). In a more general sense, it describes a type of gullible, easily manipulated mindset of the common man, where superficial values and attachment to a comfortable life overshadow the rational mind.
M. Frisch's dramaturgy can be described as a theatre of intellectual fantasy, so the performance is built on a comic and playful basis, weaving together elements of contemporary circus, acrobatics, physical comedy (slapstick), the absurd and magic tricks.
Gildas Aleksa: "This play can be seen as a comedy about an average man accustomed to the comforts of a comfortable life who doesn't want to believe that he is in danger, or as a dramatic story about our lack of skills to change our destiny, or as a reflection of the increasingly absurd process of life, as a Christian moral about the reward for bad deeds, or as an essay on how much of our freedom we are (un)willing to give up in order to make ourselves safer".
