Kubo (remake)

Kubo, a legendary Slovak play, has been staged twice by the Slovak Chamber Theatre in Martin; both stagings have since become iconic. This ordinary story of a village simpleton who finds himself involved in a love affair and in a labyrinth of neighbourly intrigues over property is indeed a legend in the Slovak theatre. The latest production of Kubo bears the subtitle “remake”, suggesting to the informed viewer that the director is making a statement about his own relationship to tradition rather than about the play’s subject matter.

In the traditional scheme of comedy staging, Kubo is a funny outsider, a step aside from mental “normality”. In this new production, however, Kubo is the meditative, motionless centre of a carousel of ecstatic vulgarity and hysterical stylisation. The surrounding world with its brutality and satiric obsession with alcohol and sex are in a sharp contrast with the quiet meditation of the “God’s fool”, whose misunderstanding of the world in which he lives and of human relationships is understandable rather than laughable. We laugh at the hectic rate at which the world around us is decaying, at the joyful dementia and idiocy of the characters, at the spectacular stupidity of relationships... while Kubo himself remains there to remind us that what we are laughing at is actually strict morality.