LÉTO V LAPONSKU / THE SUMMER IN LAPLAND

Jaroslav Rudiš

Cast: 3 men, 2 women

A solitary landscape and a deserted road somewhere in Finland. It is summer, and the days are exceptionally long. Lucie and Leoš are trying to hitchhike all the way North to Lapland. They left behind many problems and think these have stayed home and are forgotten. Thirty-one year old Leoš has been leading a comfortable, boring life with his somewhat atypical family. He worked in the second basement office in the Defence Ministry building as an army historian and did not show much interest in women or real life. His cynical father was not really interested in the family and kept turning female clients into his lovers by blackmail. Leoš´s deranged mother has a fixation on her only son while at the same time succumbing to a sect guru Orion who keeps speaking of astral motorways. The mother kept forcing her son to join her both in the Spiritualist seances and in the trips on Orion´s roads. On one of these excursions looking for cosmic energy Leoš´s path crossed with that of wild Lucie who is strangely obsessed with myths and shamans from the far away country of Lapland. From that moment on his story suddenly took off and he started on his fast-track journey to maturity. The theatrical road story is told in flashbacks, with past situations ordered into  kaleidoscopical sequence of events.

  The play is available also in Finnish translation.