ENCROACHMENT (ENCROACHMENT 22)

Iva Klestilová

Cast: 6 men, 4 women

In her play Cramped that was produced at the National Theatre under the title Cramped 22 Iva Klestilová leaves the restrictions of exploring the female inner world and she confronts her heroine with the society. We are watching a woman on the starcase of a house. She has just stopped for a little while, got stuck in a moment that requires decision from her, to become absorbed in the world of ther inner fantasies. However, the main character of the play is not the woman but the house where she is standing on the staircase. The snatches of conversations that she has overheard create microstories of the people that live there and she is looking at her own sitation from the points of view of those stories. The Woman sitting on the stairs is dealing with a quite banal life situation – she doesn’t know, she is not sure if she wants to continue seeing the Man, if she is longing to further work on their relationship. The Man cannot understand her behaviour, her inactivity. From his point of view, things are much easier: “When we want to be together / We are upstairs / Simply logical/ When we don’t, we are on the staircase.” The Woman is “connected” with other female characters. Each of them depicts a certain stage of a female life. The phantom of the Pregnant Woman who once ran under the car of one man living in the house because she was scared of giving a birth is bringing up the topic of motherhood. In comparison with that, the Older Woman portrays the final stage, an archetype of how we are all going to end up. Trapped in a marriage that cannot lead anywhere anymore, the future doesn’t exist and the past is forgotten. Between the characters of the Pregnant Woman and the Older Woman is emerging space for the character of the Woman. Her current lover has actually nothing to do with her deciding. She defines their relationship with the following words: “It is not unpleasant.”

In her play Cramped she is trying for the first time to capture also the world of men. Also the male characters in the play are connecting and are showing the general development of a male life. Starting with the Man who doesn’t understand the deciding of the Woman and gives up on their relationship and continuing with the huband of the Older Woman who is the same victim of the long-term stereotype as his wife and who is escaping to his own world. There is also a homosexual couple – as a proper counterweight of the relationship between the Man and the Woman. The end of the play is cathartic in a bitter way. The Lady and the Gentleman appear. The Lady is most probably the former owner of the house and she came to die there. The Gentleman has no power to stop her and he is helplessly wathing her committing suicide – that is in fact a self-realization. The Lady reminisces the former glamour of the house: “Polished marble… / Here… / Everywhere… There was… / Polished marble / Each door was… covered with leather… / A uniformed doorman was standing downstairs… / He greeted people…“ This beauty, this life that had some set of rules belongs according to the Lady to the previous century: “Your century has gone past me.“ That is the message of the play: not us but the whole century is not in order.

                                                                                                           (Lenka Havlíková)

The play won the second prize at Alfréd Radok Foundation Awards in 2001.

The play is available in the Czech original and English translation.