Authors

Horoščák's first play Mein Faust - one of innumerable treatments of the classic Faust theme - robs Faust of his glamour, rendering him a morose alcoholic. The author records Faust's hardships, which end with his death, in a sweep replete with literary allusion. Trakl, Horoščák's next play, takes as its inspiration the life of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl. The translator Ludvík Kundera discusses the curse of the Expressionists (with reference to Trakl) in the following terms: "The tragic poet Trakl gives testimony to his woes. And those of others. The woes of humanity 'looking down the barrel of a gun'. The load he takes for himself is the burden of the age." In Horoščák's play the figures we meet are those with whom Trakl lived and about whom he wrote. These include his friend Karl (Kraus), his beloved sister Greta, and Sonya, prostitute and Dostoyevsky heroine. Horoščák shows us how the pharmacist Trakl himself falls prey to drugs, and we see the development of an incestuous relationship between the poet and his sister. Also based on reality is the first image of war-time, in which the hero, surrounded by piles of corpses, wishes to shoot himself. Horoščák adds texture to the known biographical facts with motifs of his own and the figure of the Kaiser as commentator. Trakl's expressionistic language comes into its own through the use of monologue. Individual scenes from Trakl's life are freely developed in a sequence of images; these testify to the grief and agony of his experience, and the derailing of one man's destiny as it beats against the respectability of its surroundings. But all the while we are aware of the timelessness of our theme, a theme we know from Dostoyevsky - that of a man controlled and tormented by demons. Horoščák's play Boiled Heads or Girl, Death Dances on Your Tits is a black comedy which makes marked reference to principles of 'coolness' in the theatre. Individual situations, freed of historical relevance, are founded on the chance meeting of a number of young and middle-aged people; this meeting brims with physical violence, coarseness and sex. Without reason or explanation the characters inflict injury on one another. Viewed superficially, this play bears similarity to the work of Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane and Marius von Mayenburg; but, at the same time, there is much in Horoščák's writing which contrasts with theirs. In Horoščák's interpretation, the naturalism of perversion is not a cry of desperation, nor a depiction of the ragged emotional life of a younger generation doing all it can to set itself apart from the banal life of its parents: his writings have no truck with pathos and they make no plea to change the world. Horoščák keeps out of the fights of his characters, to whom he is indifferent, treating them as model figures in whom evidence of sensitivity (such as sympathy and pain) are suppressed. The pasts and personal traumas of all the characters - the violent man, the timid wife, the adolescent, the hopeless alcoholic - are thrown into relief by the absurd situations in which they find themselves. The generational conflict with which the play begins, is deceptive: indeed it is turned on its head, as it becomes plain that the respectable parents are greater monsters than their children. No one here is free from guilt. And language, too, is a culprit. None of Horoščák's scenes contain actual violence: they refer to it after the fact. And this violence is slapstick - not in the manner of the kick up the backside or custard-pie fight of the silent films, but it is playful nevertheless. (We remember the image of heads boiling on the bodies of victims.) A play within a play, references to action movies (notably Tarantino's take on violence), the absence of a coherent story, causality and psychology - all these things come together to make the drama of Marek Horoščák a grotesque grimace and a steadfast refusal to a make a statement.

Deutsch Marek HOROŠČÁK, Deutsch.doc