The play was first produced in London in 1970 at the Almost Free Theatre in Soho by the Interaction Arts Cooperative's TOC (The Other Company) directed by Israeli writer and theatre director Naftali Yavin; the cast included Andrew Norton, Judy Monahan, Jane Bond, Robert Walker and Jan Chappell.
I first intended to write an essay, a pamphlet, against the theatre, but then I realized that a paperback isn't an effective way to publish an anti-theatre statement.
[4] Rather than placing the focus on themselves, the actors instead turn the audience into the main point of interest by making them aware of how they are breathing, sitting, thinking, etc.
It is expected that the men, in both the audience and on stage, will be wearing dark jackets and white shirts with plain ties.
The characters merely pick up and leave off the discourse in a random order, speaking for varying lengths of time.
The more objective they are, the closer they are to Handke's intention of isolating the actors from the audience in order to emphasize the language.
Handke listed some "Rules for the actors" at the beginning of the script including such things as watching "the behaviour of tramps and idlers as they amble on the street and play the machines in the penny arcades.
Offending the Audience falls under the style of epic theater as established by dramatist Bertolt Brecht.
A major characteristic of epic theater is alienation, which is used to prevent the audience from becoming emotionally involved and distracted from the underlying issue of the play.
In this particular case, the fact that the actors are not pretending to be other characters and are instead speaking straightforwardly to the audience is an alienation effect.
Handke wished to challenge the relationship of language and reality and to make the audience "intensely, unbearably conscious of the fundamentally arbitrary connections between words and things, until the linguistic mucilage that holds the world and our minds together crumbles.
The stage is usually bare, but there could be a false set in order to deceive the audience into thinking that it will be a conventional play.
Subsequently, it was produced at numerous locations, especially colleges, in the U.S., Australia, China, South Africa and the UK.