Slovak National Theatre Drama kindly invites you to two newest premieres: A Winter Funeral by Chanoch Levin on 29 March and Russian Diaries by Aľa Rachmanovová and Roman Polák on 30 March 2019.
A Winter Funeral
by Chanoch Levin
29 March 2019
A poetic farce by the iconic Israeli writer Chanoch Levin has the most rewarding vantage point. A family is planning a wedding and a funeral. Yet the two cannot be held simultaneously. Four hundred guests are invited to the wedding, where eight hundred chickens are to be served. Should the wedding be cancelled just because an aunt died and her son promised her, on her death bed, that the entire family would come to part with her? Thus, colourful and accidental pedestrians or rather runners – intellectuals start emerging in the colourful story. We all are more interconnected than we think: with each other and with miracles that are beyond us. Hence, the second part of the fantasy farce takes us flying over the Himalayas. Along with ordinary people, we meet the angels of life and death. Wedding and funeral are metaphorical milestones of our pilgrimages, no matter how much we keep on resisting them. Nonetheless, at least one of them is impossible to sidestep. Yet even that doesn’t necessarily have to happen without laughter.
Chanoch Levin was a brilliant poet, writer, and journalist. He was first and foremost unique and inimitable as playwright and theatre-maker. By the time of his death in 1999, he had managed to write sixty-three plays. Sixty-three bitter comedies or funny tragedies that prided themselves with all colours of laughter – from a sad smile to roaring laughter of spectators worldwide.
Russian Diaries
by Aľa Rachmanovova & Roman Polák
30 March 2019
“We shall shoot you like dogs, along with your white collars, you intelligent swine.”
What to do when academic achievement which one longed for the entire life, suddenly becomes a drawback; when knowledge becomes an instrument of dominance and suppression; when one becomes subject of suspicion just because of wearing spectacles? What to do when crudeness becomes a virtue, ignorance is deemed to be innocence and ruthlessness is seen as “fair anger”? Can educational attainment and cultural astuteness defend themselves and their status? Rachmanova’s diaries portray the fate of a young girl from a cultured family who thirsts for learning during the Bolshevik revolution and the Russian civil war. The diaries are most powerful, authentic and impressive account about an era that sprang out of control, a terrifying narrative that is at the same time deep, one that unveils the deepest corners of the soul.
Photo: Russian Diaries ©Slovak National Theatre
