Snake Ball

Michal Lang

HADÍ KLUBKO / SNAKE BALL 

1 woman, 3 men

The basic action line is a spy story in which řgure peculiar beings which are always changing their identity. Jindřich Hýl wakes up in a strange apartment. His childhood friend, Prcek, arrives. Together they try to reconstruct the events of the day just gone - to unravel them like a tangle. Hýl conřdes to Prcek that he is the major of a special unit for the war against terrorism and that they have found themselves in the apartment of the world famous terrorist Greta Bombata, and not in the apartment of the storekeeper Vlasta, the role in which Greta is masquerading, and that in the terrarium by the wall were poisonous snakes which have disappeared. Prcek disagrees with this version of events. According to him it wasn't snakes but guinea-pigs in the terrarium and Vlasta really is a storekeeper whom he loves and has decided to marry. The policeman Veselej appears onstage, having come directly from a bomb attack in the supermarket Nonstop. Their combined strength succeeds in persuading Hýl that he is not a major and Vlasta is not a terrorist. At that moment a snake bites Veselej. Prcek owns up to a sophisticated plan of revenge, because of jealousy and the wrongs Hýl has perpetrated on him since childhood. The play ends with Hýl's monologue to his mother in which he again throws doubt on everything to which we have been witnesses.

Through various ways, the audience witnesses the developing story, like a continuously torn řlm which has been stuck together and goes through various repetitions, a story which has no end nor beginning, and in which time is a relative item. (Vladimír Hulec: Je to hodně divná hra, Mladá Fronta Dnes, 23. 2. 2002)

Snake Ball falls into the current of domestic dramas /.../, but at the same time there is an unexpectedly playful comic quality present. /.../ Irony predominates over impersonated abnormality and the whole thus becomes an almost surrealistically harmonised spectacle. /.../ The game with řction and reality belongs to the greatest devices of the play. Also arising from this source is humour, tension and above all an unbearably authentic feeling of anxiety and increasing madness. (Jana Machalická: Postmoderně zdivočelá skládanka, Lidové noviny, 11. 2. 2002)