Comedy about the End of the World

grown-ups

FROM SLAVKO GRUM AWARD JURY'S JUSTIFICATION: It’s a farce as much as our reality is a farce, even though, as the play’s central character says “this is no time for a farce. Reality demands serious drama.” Reality demands, as the author accurately establishes, that we start asking ourselves about the end of the world, that we start asking ourselves whether the time has come to grow and fence off our own vegetable allotments or do we simply continue to grow grass – and deal in it … In a house in the suburbs with an overgrown garden, in an almost beckettian setting, the play’s four characters marked with their imagined theatre reality, but all four of them easily recognisable as people from our immediate reality, are also asking themselves these same questions. The four of them: tenant Joe Orton, a non-achieving playwright, house owner Elvira, a non-achieving actress, tenant Majerhold, an environmental scientist under cover, and Konjevič, a man with different imagined identities, cannot come to an agreement on what is to be done about the garden or about saving the world. With this, far from optimistic forecast on how society’s current issues are going to be resolved on the doorstep of doomsday, the author makes it clear that in a battle between principled innovators and unscrupulous money-makers, the latter will prevail just like they have many times before and despite all apocalyptical prognoses. At the same time, the skilfully written dialogue, aphorisms and clever plays on words of this play, make us think about what in it is real. And what is real at all. Who is honest and who is hiding behind a mask, and most of all, is the end of the world a looming reality or merely the scenery for the battle of opposing interests. A battle in which both, revolutionary scientists and exploiting profiteers, go underground.  

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