The function of colour in a play by Oskar Kokoschka

Abstract

The object of this discussion, the play »Morder, Hoffnung der Frauen« (»The killer, hope of women«) by the Austrian painter and writer Oskar Kokoschka, as one of the first expressionist plays has a prominent literary-historical value both as a forerunner of expressionist drama and as a pattern according to which the expressionist program was constructed. The function of colour as a significant dramatic component of this early expressionist work is here under special scrutiny. It is established that colour plays manifold roles. Its primary function, purely colouristic, serves in the figurative-esthetic construction of the scenic space on a pictorially conceived stage. But colour outgrows this primary function and assumes other dimensions. Besides being an attribute of objects it becomes an attribute of emotional and psychic values, a symbol and a metaphor. Assuming a high symbolic function, colours become active participants in the dramatic action. The conflict between characters, the Man and Woman, turns into a conflict of two, principles, of White and Red and of the properties attributed to them which are universal regardless of time and space. The analysis of these symbols is in fact the exploration of the author’s relation to hiis own unconsciousness, to what in the drama is represented by Black.