Between Heaven and Her

Dodo Gombár

BETWEEN HEAVEN AND HER (MEDZI NEBOM A ŽENOU)

M 2, F 1

The prologue introduces the audience to the play’s game principle. A Stagehand finds a theatre scenario on the stage and starts reading it giving life to both the Man and the Woman characters. At the same time he becomes a sort of a guide to the action, a lyric commentator and prime mover of the twelve scenes in the play stylised to represent the twelve months of a year. The series of the scenes/sketches is linked together by declamatory texts of the Stagehand who – in a couple of poetic lines – sketches the mood of both the individual month and the love conflict.

The scenes map different conflicts between men and women, real and bizarre, as seen from different angles. The individual months of the year help create a parable of the development of the lovers’ relationship, its beginning, development and destruction. Sometimes it’s a happy love, sometimes it’s a split and parting, sometimes it’s a young couple and sometimes an older one. The mood of the month in question is mirrored in the scene: January represents birth of love, February a conversation of the lovers in bed, March is a pantomime of the Man and the Woman on a bench in park etc. The themes and motives of the Apple of the Original Sin, sex, and doubting love on the one hand; and its invocation and worship on the other hand, with the plot of some of the scenes interlinking to the others. The finale of the play finds the Old Woman and the Old Man going to bed not because of sex but to get some sleep – as the year comes to its close, is it supposed to be the Eternal Sleep?

Translated into English by Danica Haláková, into Polish by Izabella Zalcman.