Its subject matter rendered it unlikely for production under the GDR's repressive cultural policies, but Müller's status as the nation's most eminent playwright after the death of Bertolt Brecht allowed him great leeway for travel, and so when the progressive director of the prestigious Schauspielhaus Bochum offered him and his director B. K. Tragelehn the chance to premier the work there, the GDR's cultural czars offered no objection.
The play is in Müller's highly laconic late style: there are no stage directions; punctuation is sparse, giving the text a bald, telegraphic affect despite the elaborate rhetoric of the often long speeches.
No setting or time period are mentioned in the text, although the Bochum program book does offer the rubric "Time/place: salon before the French Revolution/bunker after the III World War".
The almost unlimited interpretive freedom offered by the text has made the work a favorite of adventurous and radical directors (among them Michael Haneke and Robert Wilson) while the virtuosity of the roles, combined with the lurid language and vivid imagery, has made the piece a party piece for star performers, particularly in one-shot festival settings.
It can safely be said that any serious staging will heavily emphasize one of the author's abiding concerns: the inherent cruelty of human existence, the way all relationships ultimately come down to struggles for possession and defeat of "the other."