Buggers and Suckers

Portraying the banality and emptiness of today’s world in a work of art and transforming them into a powerful, cathartic aesthetic experience is probably the most difficult task. The SkRAT theatre have a distinctive performing style: they masterfully handle the “non-theatricality” of the themes they use as their point of departure, such as banality, stereotype, and loss of genuine emotions, which affect the exhausted and stressed people from what once used to be referred to as the “middle class”. These people lack the simple vitality of the plebs as well as the pride and wealth of the new aristocracy of celebrities, remaining somewhere in the middle of the void – in the grey zone of the modern Western world – helpless and disoriented. With its fragmentary structure, peculiar imagery of awkwardness, charming minimalist acting, and ironic allusions to various pseudo-avant-garde theatre approaches, Buggers and Suckers treats the life experience of these people in a very thorough manner. Thanks to the absence of any kind of moralising violence, the viewer almost subconsciously takes in the strict intellectual and aesthetic order which is due to real knowledge of the subject and its artistic mastery.

“We feel that we have ended up in a small, magically perverse world where things are happening so that their pieces remain in our heads even in the rush of everyday reality... We are witnessing an encounter of two mischievous ladies with an enticing, passive, male body ... or an unusually harsh conversation between a young manageress and her subordinate, an elderly diploma engineer.”
Eva Andrejčáková, SME

 “... words remain just words, although they are often void of any statement, absurd and empty at the first glance, as is often the case in the plays of the SkRAT theatre... Work versus privacy are mutually, subconsciously and adversely affected. Who are, in fact, the buggers and the succkers, or the superior and the subordinate, the dominant and the submissive, the loved and the loving?”
Dáša Čiripová, kød

 “It is interesting to see that it is mainly the female characters who are cast in the roles of the buggers, whether it be the young manageress who has reached her position by offering sexual services and is now giving orders to all sides to decode and forward. Or the enthusiastic leader of teambuilding in the sectarian scene Give Me Five, where colleagues try to keep up the enthusiasm for a positive approach and constantly confirm it to each other by the mutual clapping of hands.”
Juraj Šebesta, Pravda