Father, Mother, Booze

Father, Mother, Booze is a one-man show with cabaret elements. Yet, it can hardly be called stand-up theatre. Though Lucskay uses humour, it is just one – and certainly not the most effective – of his means to communicate with the audience. Rather than a stand-up, the form resembles slam. Changes in mood and genre colours, interactivity with the audience, the use of choruses, singing and poetic elements, along with frequent stepping out of the role and alternating civil and highly stylised speech are more of a slam than a comic method. (…) Identity is the central theme. Local patriotic identity (represented by the sentence of the Father commenting on the drunken character under the table: “Robi Hood couldn’t handle the accelerator, he’s from Pozsony!”), national identity, incantated in Zoom conversations, personal identity in the desire to break through and come to terms with family evil. And, finally, the identity of human being, which the production does not attribute to the soul, but to the brain. The brain, spinal cord and nerves are the points where everything is stored – feelings, experiences and memories. The brain is the king of the show, the king physically present in the form of a prop.
Brain is a river into which all springs of stories flow. Father, Mother, Booze is a truly magical production that focuses on the fundamental pitfalls of the human predicament; the only artistic direction that can briefly described it is social surrealism. (…) The performance simulates psychological processes, where the audience zone is the zone of consciousness and encounter with the surrounding world, the proscenium zone is the subconscious where reality is processed, and the stage is the unconscious where the stories are shuffled according to a key that is more impulse-emotional rather than rational.
By entering the Thália theatre, you enter the gigantic brain, and become witnesses and co-creators of the plot. You become the thoughts and neural impulses which the Self uses to communicates to sort out its own life. The approach makes the production utterly unique! (…) In the era of instant prefabricated art, the author’s personal confession in the form of a slam or deep stand-up is an acceptable compromise, as well as his expression of a desire for authenticity…

Tomáš Straka: Ha-ha. In kød – konkrétne o divadle, 2022, No 5, pp 29 – 33