Tales of Common Insanity

Petr Zelenka

PŘÍBĚHY OBYČEJNÉHO ŠÍLENSTVÍ / TALES OF COMMON INSANITY

7 women, 8 men

The story of thirty-five-year-old Peter, who is trying to master the world around him; to win back his girlfriend Jana, who left him because of his "abnormality"; to survive visits to his parents which are never free of his mother's fussy and interfering worries about others; not to go mad due to the crazy methods of satisfaction of his friend Midge; to get used to his strange neighbours who require people with their eyes "on the surface of their faces"; to accept the fact that his boss likes little boys; to get used to the blanket in his room coming to life... In the end there is only one solution: to pack oneself up in a box and send oneself off somewhere very far away. A witty reflection on our times, including a reference to the recent past and its still active influence. The text also plays with references to the sphere of "artistic creativity", in inverted commas because his neighbour is a composer of elevator music, his father was once, in the Communist era, a weekly newsreel commentator and now brings this up in public as a curiosity, and one of Midge's girlfriends, although a cleaner, loves ballet. The action is kept going by the constant effort to find and maintain a real relationship; whether in the case of the younger ones (Peter and his circle), or of their parents. Both the theme and the form of the play relate to the original script-writing profession of the author - the scenes follow one another as in film sequences.

The virtue of Zelenka's text is its economy and its aphoristically formulated lines in which more is hinted at than spoon-fed, /.../ one recognises here the art of film editing and concise characteristics of the characters. (Radmila Hrdinová: Zelenkovi sympaticky šílení hrdinové poprvé v divadle, Právo, 4. 12. 2001)

The hypersensitivity with which Zelenka examines and comically makes use of human anomalies is reminiscent of the self-ironic obsessiveness of Woody Allen. (Richard Erml: Je nám tady spolu tak nějak divně, Mladá fronta Dnes, 18. 12. 2001)