Over All the Mountain Tops By Thomas Bernhard

This play is Bernhard’s devastating satire on the business of literature.
The novelist Moritz Meister, after years of neglect, has finally achieved the status of Grand Old Man of German literature. With breathtakingly regal condescension he receives his minions: a graduate student writing a thesis on him, a journalist preparing an adulatory article, his publisher arranging the publication of his magnum opus. He regales them – and the audience – with noble, high-flown thoughts on art and life, while exploiting his situation to the full to gain honors and material comforts.
Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) was one of the major and most controversial German-language dramatists of the 1970s and 1980s. His very individual use of the theater reduces traditional structures such as plot and character to a minimum and turns the stage into a vehicle for his virtuoso use of language and deeply pessimistic view of life.