I bought myself a ticket, sat down on a bench, and watched the king and his retinue struggle with the plush tentacles. I looked about myself; there were not many spectators. The long benches contained several groups of young people drinking beer — they might have been friends and relatives of the actors. In the Revnice rendering of the scene, the giant squid kills the king and his fiancée and eats them. The naturalism in the depiction of Dru’s and Isili’s deaths was a strange contrast to the childish representation of the squid. The plush tentacles pulled Dru and Isili down into the sea. When they had gone from the stage, their terrible shrieks could still be heard as they were eaten alive; great geysers of red paint squirted high into the air. Then there was an interval. I bought myself a beer in a plastic cup and drank this slowly while I waited to see how the action would develop.
Although we had just witnessed the terrible death of the king and his fiancée, both these characters reappeared in the next act. The stage was set as a room in a modern-day apartment. Dru and Isili, who live in this room as tenants in straitened circumstances, are discussing the unspecified nightmares they have both been having. The room next to theirs is occupied by another tenant, a disagreeable bank clerk who looks like a bank clerk in a pre-war comedy film. The clerk is forever bothering Dru and Isili with his complaints (they haven’t mopped the bathroom floor, they have the radio on too loud at night, etc.) In the course of one of his visits it turns out that he, too, has recurrent nightmares on a similar theme. All three tenants dream of an evening by the sea, of a struggle in which the points of daggers glow with a red fire, there are great undulating serpents, and the foam of the sea is mixed with blood. It soon became clear to the tipsy Revnice audience that Dru and Isili were in the afterworld, living in a post-mortal city, that their past life was returning to them in these vague dreams; after a time, the characters, too, remember their pre-death existence. The author of the play mixed motifs from the island’s Book with the work of Ladislav Klíma and Swedenborg.
But the role of the clerk in the events on Vauz remained unclear. The three characters try for some time to figure this out together; then their memories suddenly come into sharp focus: in life, the post-mortal bank clerk was the squid. The clerk goes into shock and bursts into tears. Dru and Isili throw themselves at him; they scold him and beat him while he whimpers and pleads for mercy. Dru and Isili take a cruel revenge on the erstwhile squid: they make him their servant and humiliate and bully him. The clerk who was once a squid takes the abuse and the slaps from both his tormentors with cowardly submissiveness, but all the time, unobtrusively but cleverly, he is plotting against them. He succeeds in turning Dru and Isili against each other to such a degree that they begin to hate each other. To humiliate Dru, Isili becomes the lover of the bank clerk who was once a squid, and together they decide to kill Dru. At night when Dru is sleeping, Isili unlocks the door of the room for the clerk to enter. The erstwhile squid holds Dru down while Isili drives a knife into his chest several times. In the course of this grim scene streams of red paint once again spurted onto the floor of the stage and the grass in front of it. A very strange play, I said myself, although I was well used to various guises of the bizarre from the island’s Book and imagined myself unshockable by any kind of literary eccentricity.
Then Isili and the squid live together. Memories of his life in the ocean deep gradually come back to the bank clerk; he tells Isili about it every evening at dinner. They promise each other they will both try to return as squids in their next incarnation — massive, beautiful and strong they will swim through the depths together. They tell each other they will have to be on their guard against Dru — who is bound to want to avenge himself — but they hope that his violent death in the post-mortal world will have sent him to a distant underworld, from where it will take him a long time to make his way back to our universe.
The next act — a balletic interlude — was set in the sea. Green filters pushed in front of spotlights and long gauze drapes rippling in the Revnice breeze were intended to create the illusion of an undersea world. Romantic music I didn’t recognize was played over the speakers. Two figures in grey leotards ran onto the stage, one from each side; it was Isili and the bank clerk, who had become squids. Now the director was ignoring the literality of earlier scenes in favour of a more modernist approach. There were no plush probosces sewn onto the dancers’ leotards; the twenty tentacles were represented by the movements of four arms waving about continually like those of Indian dancers, pulling the body onto the tips of the toes in their rise before falling in languid sinusoids to the boards of the Revnice stage; stretching for alluring underwater depths and returning to their starting point, as if in the knowledge that the most beautiful place of this magnificent underwater life was precisely where one happened to be. The imaginary tentacles created in the arm movements of the dancers combined over and over in new figures of tenderness and passion. Apparently the ballet was meant to represent a life of freedom and joy in the depths of the ocean. The act ended with the peaceful death of the elderly squid Isili and the grief of her consort, who now wrung his tentacles and whirled around the corpse on the seabed in an expressive dance of despair (the weary undulating of the ballerina’s arms represented the currents of the sea toying with the squid’s remains), and moved his arms to indicate that he was embracing his dead mate with all his tentacles and that he would never overcome his sadness.
Encounter above the Neckar
For the next act, which followed after another interval, there was again a change of scene. We found ourselves on the glassed-in terrace of a villa obviously built on an elevated spot on a hillside: through the glass wall one could see to the bottom of the hill, where a peaceful river ran through a quaint old town with narrow streets watched over by domed churches. The river was spanned by a magnificent towered bridge, and immediately beyond the last houses of the town there were hills covered in deep forest. Partway up one of the hills — like a weightless, two-dimensional picture — were the ruins of a great castle. (The town in the valley was in fact produced by a colour slide projected onto a screen.) This town, hemmed in by hills on all sides, was familiar; I realized the slide was a view of Heidelberg in Baden-Württemberg. So this had to be one of the villas on the hillside that rises sharply on the right-hand (north) bank of the Neckar.
There’s the piercing sound of the house’s doorbell. Emerging from inside the house, a white-haired old man comes on to the terrace and opens the door. Standing behind him is a young girl. She has just arrived in Heidelberg to study at the university; she has read about the availability of lodgings at the villa in the classified ads of a newspaper. So that’s how the girl came to live in the villa above the Neckar. She and the kindly old man become friends. Every day they sit together on the terrace and the old man talks about his life, which in no way has been exciting — he spent his career as a clerk at Heidelberg City Hall. His children have not lived with him for many years, and when a few years ago his wife died, he decided to rent out rooms to students.