Pressburger blut

For the past ten seasons, GUnaGU has been performing exclusively its own plays, whether mine, or plays by Ivan Mizera or Vlado Balek and our seventeen titles have, over the years, formed links, which connect them unwillingly into larger volumes. One of them is also a loose „Bratislava trilogy” using the backdrop of Bratislava, to present our feelings or poetry, which we have been developing in any given period.

Our latest play, Presburger Blut, is the third part and possibly also a culmination of this fictitious trilogy, a melancholic sci-fi from year 2007. It does not matter, that I have placed Chinatown or Cuban quarter in Bratislava, that gangs of Panthers and Romantics wage wars in the streets, more at stake are the relationships, portraits of lost people, their fears and feelings of threat. A feeling, that this city can start (has started?) sinking like Venice.

Five pictures of a play form a sixth one, which I probably would not hang on my wall. I could hang it with its face towards the wall, but it wouldn´t alter the fact, that it is here. Currently I have this persistent feeling, that the Central European space is, after a short period of hope, sold again. And I don´t know about you, but I am left only with a chance to watch – so I keep watching and I smite bitterly, sometimes I even laugh madly. And then – with permission – I still am.

Viliam Klimáček has moved Orwell´s world from 1984 to 2007 and situated it in Bratislava ten years after a fictitious war. In five acts he places into the foreground and illuminates sharply details or rather fragments of authentic human relationships, devoured ruthlessly by unified way of existence, the basis of which is the state of anonymous and continuous manipulation. Klimáček is not interested in the character or technology of this estranged world, rat her its prehistory and fractions of its „human dimension", powerless (and therefore touching) attempts by people to salvage in such world the last shreds of their humanity. Their expressions in this play are reduced to few facts and recollection of „former reality”, on life „before”. Klimáček is able very gently and at the same time effectively include meaning-forming detail of the human world into a prefabricated structure of dehumanized world. Associations derived from this are the source of suggestive and at the same time melancholic drama action. „Dear God, could you send your son to Bratislava?” calls out one of the characters in this play. Whether it is a question or a request, remains undecided.
Ján Štrasser Lidové noviny, June 8, 1994

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