Dolls and Dollies

Arnošt Goldflam
DOLLS AND DOLLIES (ŽENY A PANENKY)

translation Eva Daníčková

F 6

At the beginning, the new play by Goldflam pretends to be a probe into the life of a
family made up of several generations, and exclusively of women. A seven-year old
girl opens the play with a monologue introducing the audience to her dolls. But the
grotesque, fake-motherly relationship she has with the dolls will soon introduce a
darker theme of the play - the theme of power pecking order inside the family,
manipulation linked to the hierarchy, and changes in these relationships as people
get more mature and older. The "conversation" is gradually joined by the girl's
teenage sister, cynical and rough, and their senile great-grandmother. The old
woman is being chased away together with her weird stories about the old world by
the mother of both girls who keeps venting her anger on her. But the mother herself
is treated roughly by her own mother - the grandmother, obviously a woman at the
peak of her power, is an "indispensable" ruler of the family. A Doll is the sixth
character of the play; in her monologues she meditates on her existence condemned
to immobility and represents the essence of female powerlessness and dreaming.
The five women go through situations brought in by family life and dominated by
common meals. But, with the same spontaneity, they look into basic situations of life
as such. Birth, illness, death (love is conspicuous by its absence) are seen through
the perspective of five differently skewed attitudes to life. The relationships keep
escalating in rough dialogues and contrasted soliloquies and litanies, prose morphs
into verse, song and dance resulting in physical duels. The play featuring excellent
characterization through language hovers on a thin border between reality and the
Surreal, between slapstick and horror. Arnošt Goldflam in top form.
The premiere of the play - April 2009.