NEHYBNOST / IMMOBILITY

Roman Sikora

Cast: 4 men, 4 women, 1 fly, 1 freak, extras

An excremental panoptikum about futures full of flies 

Sikora’s play is governed by a “spirit of fantasy” – or a magician who “transformed life into stinking, stagnant dishwater”. The author however attributes the panoptikum environment – inspired by the Czech and global reality, including its reflection in the local press – to our own idiocy. A pair of lovers, representing some sort of modern vulgarised Tristan and Isolde, are expecting a child. During her fifty-month pregnancy he grows proportionately fatter from boredom and emptiness. She foretells for her child a Messianic role in the world into which she is bringing him and which she ironically calls “paradise”. The newly-born freak dies immediately after birth. Thanks to the presence of characters like, for example, the Gamekeeper, a kind of representative of public order characterised by his Nazi past, and the tomfool Three Kings, democratically elected, the play has a politically critical subtext. In 17 short, carefully titled scenes, loony dialogue alternates in a stable sarcastic tone with ironic monologues, orgiastic versicles and banal songs, which only distract us from the deadlock. The play’s refrain is the line “Let something bloody happen!” However, right at the start of the play we know that change for the better is impossible.

  The play is available in Czech original.