NÁHLÉ NEŠTĚSTÍ / SUDDEN MISFORTUNE

Daniela Fischerová

Cast: 1 man, 1 woman

A dramatic dialogue for a man and a woman whose fates, personalities and attitudes are inspired by the Biblical Job and the classical Niobe. Their meeting takes place in front of a semi-transparent mirror in a psychiatric sanatorium where both patients are in the department SA - Sudden Accident. They are waiting for visits from relations who do not turn up, and so are compelled to spend the long night alone just with the cruel truth about themselves. The text is based on confrontations: two religious traditions, the Jewish and the classical worlds, two distinctive human attitudes towards "the divine" - humility and revolt, which on an actual level permeate the patients' relationship to the doctor and to superior authority in general - the confrontation of the male and female principle (in the "lowest position", She is a neurotic and unstable drug addict and He is a religious fanatic and weakling). Paradoxically in the end both disclose testing the same knowledge which brings them close in a symbolic embrace - their uncertainty about the existence of God and at the same time their longing for it.

Bizarre pedestrian and yet poetically philosophising dialogue turns into two independent and at the same time internally corresponding monologues; from mythological characters they become contemporary people.     (Vladimír Justl: Dvakrát z pražské Violy, Denní Telegraf, 17.12.1993)

  The play is available also in English translation.