The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick
Adaptation of the novel by Peter Handke  

Gen 260

The moment before the penalty is taken. Everything stands suspended. Time, movement, certainty. Within this speck of time unfolds The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, one of the most emblematic works by the German-speaking Austrian writer Peter Handke – a text that left an indelible mark on postwar European literature. Aris Kakleas brings it to the stage as an experience of estrangement, where reality splinters and meaning remains perpetually open.

At its centre stands Josef Bloch, a former goalkeeper turned film editor. Following a murder, he abandons Vienna and seeks refuge in a small border town in Austria. From that point on, the narrative foregoes the trajectory of a crime story toward resolution and instead sinks ever deeper into a state of inner disintegration. The world surrounding Bloch appears at once familiar and incomprehensible; words drift away from things, gestures become opaque, and reality itself turns disjointed, as though it has lost its coherence.

Bloch’s profession as a film editor acquires particular gravity here: nothing appears natural or self-evident to him; everything seems cut and reassembled. It is along this fault line that Kakleas’s stage interpretation takes shape – not as a linear retelling of the novel, but as a theatrical rendering of the disturbed perceptual logic through which the protagonist filters the world.

Four narrators, pauses, repetitions, perceptual leaps, and the live transformation of space compose a field of constant instability, where everything resists fixation. With a stripped-back theatrical language and an emphasis on the body, the voice, and the gaze, Handke’s work is recast as a performance that foregrounds human anxiety at the threshold of an irreversible act.