R.I.P. (Rest in Peace)

3 women, 6 men

Rest in Peace deals with a real problem - the illegal migration of refugees from the East, the Balkans or the poor South to the safety and material security of democratic western countries. The text relates, in a hyperbolic, cruel and paradoxical manner, the events surrounding one such group of refugees. Yet a glance at the daily papers or TV will remind us that this play may indeed be all too realistic. A refugee family kept in hiding in a mountain cabin near the border by traffickers who help them across, are held up by the death of the grandfather, the oldest member of the family, whom they want to give a traditional Muslim funeral. Types and characters of individual people-smugglers are revealed in a model extreme situation. One of the traffickers gets drunk on whisky, another overdoses on barbiturates. Maruna runs a prostitution racket and a chain of sadomasochist salons in the Czech border region. The refugees are gassed to send them to sleep and robbed, one of the traffickers walling them up in a windowless room.

In its escalating perversity the cruelty of the protagonists, aroused by drugs and despair, is not only meaningless but in its way not very clever either, so that it later evokes laughter (although only for relief) just like a series of misfortunes in a silent film. The play is not a psychological study nor a socially revolutionary drama /.../ In its bizarre quality, the action is more reminiscent of a nightmare after a day spent following the black chronicles and the action serials on Nova TV /.../ A specialised, stylised and simultaneously naturalistic language (as though eavesdropped) together with very convincing details raise the text from the level of jokingly fabulous fiction to a serious attempt to record, or portray, a reality which is medially and globally demented, but unfortunately our own. (Marie Reslová: Odpočívej v pokoji, Reflex, 16. 12. 1999)