My Dad Takes Goals

2 women, 10 men, dog

A chance "epidemic" of violence breaks out among a group of people standing round a late-night refreshment stand for the father's banal birthday celebrations. The text attempts to capture the irrational psychology of outsiders and asocials. The ramblings of a frustrated alcoholic who is boasting about his son, a successful footballer, suddenly start edging away from murky sentiment and boundless admiration for his heir towards aggression, just at the moment when the son clearly voices his shame of his father's life and his wish to distance himself from it. When another participant of the drinking session steals the son's wallet, the act provides a pretext for the first, seemingly unconscious but, for this reason, all the more cynical murder. The play genre is thus gradually transformed from callous naturalism to a bizarre black grotesque. The impoverished slang favoured by the lowest strata is stylised and formally elevated with the use of staccato rhythm.

A bitter and black grotesque about the squalor of our times. It all starts on a "smiling summer night" /.../ The audience is witness first to the total dehumanisation of relationships and, in the end, to absolute destruction refuting any kind of logic of human behaviour. Pokorn˘'s play caustically, and in salvos of laughter, in the end sadly records where we have arrived, and more than that - where we have not arrived. It is a gibe against our present times. (Jiří P. Kříž: Česká čtverylka se v Ústí mění v akční trhák, Právo, 26. 1. 1999)

The language of the play is direct, pub language spiked with numerous vulgarisms. The biggest let-down withanalogous texts is that they deal with banality in a banal way. My Dad Takes the Goals, however, owes its pubperiphery poetic to essentially more interesting works whose harsh realism took hold on European stages in recent years. (Zdeněk A.Tichý: Taťkův sen noci svatojánské není příliš veselý, Mladá fronta, 26. 1. 1999)