“It’s just a shame that you always need to start with yourself.”

I am a writer. I was a writer. I was a wife, a mother, and an intellectual. I was an artist. I wanted to. I don’t want to. I see myself and I see them. I can’t see clearly!

The narrator, like an Elfriede Jelinek character from a piece of romantic fiction, stands on a balcony at night, looking down on people. Memories are escaping and grafting together. At the bottom of which bottle did the child get lost, where did the love for the man evaporate? A certain Jarda is silently becoming shaded in images of the past. There are five actors’ voices in front of him – five life phases of blurred identity! Is it a revision of the feminist desire for independence, for the individual right to organize one’s life’s monologue, but without restraints and awareness of the consequences?

Petra Hůlová, spokeswoman for contemporary ‘café’ intellectual literature, turns self-reflectively to her own guise as an author-analyst in her latest novel. She turns the pages and downs the shots of the disconnected non-chronology of her career experience. Yet she deceives with her body. She deceives with a thicket of language and ruthless sincerity. A look at the various weary perspectives of the story results in the woman dissolving into atoms – a choir categorising and balancing the taboo of women’s destiny in the precarious tension between self-destruction and healing self-therapy. It is about a living existential struggle. This is an attempt to come to terms with our own ‘sleepwalking’ steps through the apartment of post-capitalist freedom of choice.

This production was co-produced with Studio Hrdinů.

Season 42: Us and them