Drama

“After everything is said and done, it’s not impossible that this isn’t the first time that these reports of the end of the world actually took place – in the 20th cenutry, in the 18th, in the 15th, in the 11th and so on. Maybe it took place, but no one noticed it.”

A play by the world-renowned writer whose genre and style is more varied than any other in Czech literature after 1989. This drama with four scenes plus an epilogue is a play for five characters who have met in an anonymous room in a house somewhere after the apocalypse. There is only thing to be done: speak to each other in a way that makes or does not make sense. This time, Ouředník is an amused sceptic, a wry ironist and an apt player and mystifier. What if the five survivors are waiting for Godot? Or rather, what if Godot has already come and is one of them? What if both the beginning and the end, the old and the new, are relative, what if pictures and their models are relative, the plot of the story, the past, the present, the future, the objective and the meaning? Ouředník wrote a drama that is exemplarily open, postmodern, full of possibilities from which one can piece together a thousand and one ends of the world, a personal apocalypse as well as his own vision of “today and the day after tomorrow”…