(extract)

It is not an apparent criticism of the current jurisdictional causes. In each of the scenic sections of The Trial there are different archetypal creatures that use Slovakia´s size, political and social system to get away with all they want. Arrogant and self-centred justiciar oligarchy, lawyers with no backbone or the “simple ones”, who prefer never to have seen or heard anything. All they need is to “eat, drink and fart”, otherwise there will be a trouble. (…) The calvary road towards resignation, compromising and even dying will be taken by a few Jozef K.´s. (...)

Traditionally civilian entrepreneurs from the SkRAT theatre again proved to be great observers. Their sleezy jury bashaws or professionally-deformed lawyers point at the primitive juck of otherwise sophisticated society, which feeds the conformism of regular people from the street. Especially funny, but freezingly dangerous is the mentioned group of judges, mainly the smiling aggressor character, by Ľubo Burgr.

Dominika Široká: Judicatory filth on the peak of moral crisis, kod 04/2013, p. 25-28

The language game in the title itself, referring to Kafka´s existential novel, plays with the multiplication of the sense of the word process (trail, via, trial). Process can mean a never-ending change in general, just as one specific trial. If these two senses get in a sharp conflict, equity changes directly into manipulation. The word game is an expression of the state power machinery, which can easily mix the privileged ones with the regular ones. The SkRAT theatre not only brings the serious social jurisdictional issues from the past couple of years under the light, but also reflects the two-facing in media.

Verona Jankovičová: Alliteration of the crooked equity, March 2013

Modern theatre of the absurd: In “Buggers and Suckers”, Dušan Vicen and the SkRAT theatre troupe examine the lives of the stressed people in today’s world

The theatrical association SkRAT (2004) started life as the Association for the Present Day Opera (2000) in the halls of the theatre Stoka (1991). The theatrical troupe draws on the phenomenon of author theatres, which originated in Slovakia in the 1980s.

The author theatres have brought a different set of dramatic and theatrical principles and techniques to Slovakia, which were already being used by the theatre of the absurd (decomposition, fragmentariness, deconstruction). The position of the actor in particular has shifted from performer to co-author of the whole performance.

The principle method of theatre SkRAT is collective authorship and creative improvisation

Theatre SkRAT is interested in ordinary or even banal life situations, which are turned into absurd revelations with the use of hyperbole and repetition. SkRAT is also known for its innovative visual conception and use of new technologies.

Dušan Vicen (1966) is an author of dramatizations, radio plays and theatre plays (“Caress the dog! Apotheosis of Emptiness”, “Silluet b mol”, “Homo Joga”). As a founding member, director, co-author and actor he participated in a few theatre projects. Since the principle method of theatre SkRAT is collective authorship and creative improvisation, the final version of the play emerges during the rehearsal process. The co-authors are Vít Bednárik, Ľubo Burgr, Lucia Fričová, Daniela Gudabová, Milan Chalmovský, Romana Maliti.

“Buggers and Suckers” consists of seventeen short scenes

The newest play in SkRAT´s repertoire “Buggers and Suckers” , written by Dušan Vicen, consists of seventeen short scenes, sketches mainly from the milieu of management. Both thematically (social issues, human isolation, dysfunction of human relationships) as well as in terms of form (appealing visual effects and music, projections), “Buggers and Suckers” follows in the tradition of previous plays, such as “Dead Souls”, “Paranoia”, “Die- Snuff and Conk out”.

“Buggers and Suckers” captures the modification of social and anthropological categories. At first, humans were hunters and gatherers. The contemporary individual is determined by his working environment and above all by his position (as bugger or sucker) in the company. The author reveals the inhumanity and absurdity of the system underneath the glaze of professional ethics and transparency.

Vicen’s reflection reveals a new kind of dictate – that of money and social status

In previous performances, such as “Dead Souls” and “Paranoia”, the theatrical troupe SkRAT confirmed its interest in the theatre of the absurd. Their interpretation of absurdity is not absolute; rather it is determined by Slovak social reality. More than Beckett or Ionesco their work resembles that of the Eastern and Central European authors like Václav Havel or Sławomir Mrozek. While these authors articulated the aimlessness of human existence within the frame of social and political conditions and so criticized the dictate of the socialist regime, Vicen’s reflection in “Buggers and Suckers” reveals a new kind of dictate – that of money, social and professional status, consumption and media. This addiction is all the more tragic – in terms of SkRAT’s poetics, rather tragicomic – as it is chosen willingly.

The author continues to develop this paradox in the play. It is a paradox of a human, who in an effort to feel and look authentic and original, copies foreign and artificial patterns. In doing so he loses the connection to his own traditions and natural manners, which is reflected in his communication. The main communication symbols consist of technical terms like “decode”, “forward”, “update”. Anyone who does not handle new code speech is condemned to vegetate at the bottom of this new anthropological hierarchy.

Video projections became a characteristic sign of this author theatre

The author also articulates his vision of the contemporary individual through the topic of freedom. This is done with the help of video projections, which has become a characteristic sign of this author theatre. A cyclically repeated projection of a man, who holds papers in his hands and constantly walks up the stairs, becomes a leitmotiv of the play. This modern human is constantly in a hurry for nothing. He never reaches his goal. This image offers an analogy with Camus’ Sisyphus, who is condemned to roll his stone forever, confirming the absurdity of his life.

Vicen’s interpretation of the controlled and watched human is accentuated by projections from industrial cameras. The issue of human freedom reaches its climax in the penultimate scene with the significant title Arbeit macht frei. With the help of this cruel paraphrase from our recent war history the author portrays the (post) modern labour prison of contemporary people.

The author did not write “Buggers and Suckers” just to display a competitive and destructive business milieu. The disease of our postmodern society, based on consumption and individualism, has already affected human relationships. In the tenth scene, “Genetic Material”, the author exposes the depraved and unnatural motivations that led a woman to become pregnant. Motherhood, in their interpretation, is not a fulfilment of an inner spiritual need, but a trend copied from tabloid and commercial media. Even the demands of the expectant mother towards her child (the main thing is that it has to look good) – however superficial and absurd they sound – just reflect our blind following of tips and tricks offered by media.

Vicen confronts the reader with weighty real issues. The seriousness of the key themes is balanced out by grotesque humour, which is important in the poetics of SkRAT. The author reveals the bipolarity of our cosmos with irony, sarcasm and practical jokes.

Marianna Jakubeková, New Plays blog, 16. 6. 2012

(extract)

Delusion is a fake image, and as we all know, a person living in the present is constantly affected by worlds of false concepts. He lives in it. This author project made by actors themselves and directed by Ľubo Burgr brings viewers reality in short pictures, reminding us of commercial spots. (...)

The dark scene, together with the costumes has old and rugged effect. The neon lights are blinking tragically. Old crocks are topping in the middle of stage, evoking the fire canisters, surrounded with homeless people. The red light in the background flashes, like when switching TV-channels.
There are weird things happening in front of the viewer. The three spies are watching us, or maybe something behind us, using their binoculars. Mummery alternates short word sketches with humorous but also tragic sub-tone.  Wordlessly, there comes a woman, wearing negligee with a shopping trolley. She looks very frail and artificially. The three men from “bad crime section” are watching her sneakily. There’s something wrong, but it´s fascinating.

Zuzana Šnircová: Delusion – with the SkRAT Theatre conceptions towards fake conceptions, Pravda, 17th March 2012

Are you interested in the current situation of the theatre in Slovakia? In that case, I would like to announce that the theatre company that was chosen from among several Slovak candidates to come to Wiesbaden, has just lost the roof above its head.

How is that possible? It’s simple! The venue – not a very theatrical space, by the way: no stage, no backstage, no facilities, a minimum of lanterns and hardly any technical equipment – simply called A4, was at the city’s centre and was used by various independent theatre companies, among them Theatre SkRAT. And the building’s owner, the Slovak republic’s Ministry of Culture and its organisation team simply decided to rent it out.

The committee that makes the decisions was replaced and the building was allotted to a perfidious group headed by a magician. This is not a typo or a misprint, you are correctly reading: MAGICIAN. And Theatre SkRAT has to give up after eight years.

At the time of writing, Theatre SkRAT is homeless. For the moment (end of January 2012), they have found refuge at the Polish institute in Bratislava within the framework of a project. Nobody knows what the future will bring. The Ministry of Culture shows no interest in the matter at all.

How is that possible? It’s simple! The venue – not a very theatrical space, by the way: no stage, no backstage, no facilities, a minimum of lanterns and hardly any technical equipment – simply called A4, was at the city’s centre and was used by various independent theatre companies, among them Theatre SkRAT. And the building’s owner, the Slovak republic’s Ministry of Culture and its organisation team simply decided to rent it out.

The committee that makes the decisions was replaced and the building was allotted to a perfidious group headed by a magician. This is not a typo or a misprint, you are correctly reading: MAGICIAN. And Theatre SkRAT has to give up after eight years.

At the time of writing, Theatre SkRAT is homeless. For the moment (end of January 2012), they have found refuge at the Polish institute in Bratislava within the framework of a project. Nobody knows what the future will bring. The Ministry of Culture shows no interest in the matter at all.

Martin Porubjak, catalogue of festival New Plays from Europe, p. 179

(extract)

The latest SkRAT’s play has nearly anthropological-prophetic title: Buggers and Suckers. The humankind moved a long time ago from the stage of hunters and pickers to further evolution chapters and Vicen’s play might give a name to its recent stage. (...)

And it wouldn’t be for the Slovak alternative scene, if it didn’t demonstrate, that in spite of an easy sense of humour and comicality, it finds it necessary to show a desire to open up serious and important themes. And I do confess, that the final scenic image with projections displaying bar codes (instead of tradi- tional digits above) with a famous three-word text in German original saying that “Work liberates”, can’t be erased and rewound very easily.

Petr Christov, Divadelní noviny, 26. 9. 2011

(excerpt)

Actors do not create particular characters, but rather very general types, whom they represent for the whole evening. It is not a traditional theatrical play, but rather a series of scenes illustrating a generally specific depersonalized world of big corporations as well as specific emptiness of the life of people employed there. The people who follow advice of fashion magazines and who model their own life according to successful role models advertised in them. (...) However, the play is not an agitation or a criticism of the capitalistic exploitation. On the other hand I just can’t help myself to feel that creators are somewhat fascinated by the topic itself. They seem to be drawn by this weird world with its own rules and morals. The world which might be an absurdly totalitarian as well as arbitrary authoritarian regime.

Jakub Škorpil, Svět a divadlo 04/2011, s. 118 – 131

(extract)

The scene is composed as open space with white boxes – cubicles for employees, in more levels reaching the depth of the stage, with tables and current equip- ment dominated by notebooks.

Juraj Šebesta, Pravda, 15. 2. 2011

(excerpt)

The fact is, that creators don't offer new interpretation keys to the audience, which would emphasize information present in the text to decode meaning of particular scenes. What connects the individual scenes? The emotional dryness, disability of two individuals to communicate and show emotions has become cliché in arts today. The performance Leftovers is not just numberless variation of frequent theme of emptiness; it goes further.

Miro Zwiefelhofer, kød 3/2010, p. 14 – 17

Slovakia at night. Slovakia intimate. Anonymous inhabitants of an anonymous house. The viewer as a pitiless voyeur. Armed with a searchlight...
What seems to be so naturalistic and documenting is actually stylistically composed – a radical postmodern theatre in form. And sometimes highly comical. A suspenseful atmospherically dense collage of image details, babel, noise, and snatches of music. Melancholic images and magic sounds in a twitching, zapping direction of lights and sounds. In the focus: desolate, longing bodies and dead, lost souls.

Theatre has rarely been as haunting and intrusive as in this production. "Dead Souls" – with the title of its performance the SkRAT theatre of Bratislava refers to Joy Division's song and Nikolai Gogol's novel, both of the same name. None of the references is programmatic and yet there are connections.
The song's mantra-like repeated "Keep on calling me" can be read and heard as a demand for the "never ending dialogue", for a permanent, constructive, and productive exchange. Because the exchange, which since the opening of the border in 1989 on one hand seems to be easier and less problematic than ever before, on the other hand has also become more difficult. Theatre and audience are no longer in need of the conspirative dialogue. Theatre and audience in Eastern Europe since 1989 have lost their silent consent: the complicity against the common enemy, the all-regulating, all-controlling, all-defining, all-directing bureaucracy of the state. In the age of neoliberalism, the boisterous and nearly non-regulated capitalism, theatre seems to become needless. Within the simultaneous concert of entertainment and distraction machines the stages only play a marginal role. When they are dealing with socially
relevant, politically charged subjects and topics they often reach only an audience of insiders and like-minded. When they are serving the naive and superstitious entertainment they mostly come off second after the movies
and private TV channels.
So "Keep on calling me" is the contemporary theatre's desperate appeal both to its audience as well as to the cultural funding institutions and companies. The appeal says: let's remain in debate, let's listen to each other, and give us an opportunity to articulate ourselves sustainably – by our own means and possibilities, through our medium, the theatre. It's obvious that independent theatres like the SkRAT, which receive hardly any or much too little support by the state, the cities, and the institutions, need this dialogue all the more.
Pawel Iwanowitsch Tschitschikow also seeks the dialogue, seeks the attention, the interest of others. He, the new one in town, wants to establish his reputation, possibJy a good one. He wants to win over the officials and office-holders. Because as soon as he has made some good connections life will be easier for him in the future. And he does need good connections because he wants to realize an explosive plan. He wants to take possession of "dead souls" and make a killing with them. He hopes to get the owner rights for dead thralls, also called "souls", from landowners for a cheap or no price. These souls will not be erased from the lists until the next revision. That’s why Tschitschikow wants to pawn them to the state for many times the original price and abscond by the profit. Collecting the rights for the dead, however, proves to be delicate because of the greed and distrust of the landowners.
Tschitschikow is the hero of the novel "Dead Souls", which ranks as the most important work of the Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. Gogol, in his time, in post-Napoleonic Russia, could not guess what explosive power this subject of buying and selling souls would have in post-socialistic Eastern Europe 150 years later. And without in any way citing the attitude of this novel by Gogol the SkRAT theatre, solely by the title of its performance, commented on the new (im-)morality of ruthless greed. The degradation of humankind to a product, the disappearing of any ethics and morality in economic activity, the absolutization of profit and income return on the global markets do not seem to be alternative and attractive models of culture to
most Eastern European artists. It is perceived as a progression that the society is rid of bureaucratic socialism. But a third way between the ruthless new capitalism and the old socialist bureaucracy has not been found yet. So what else is left to the home and futureless individuals besides settling down on their small private isles, in the best case as easygoing Robinsons, in most cases as desolate dead souls?

Joseph Berlinger, Cataloge Donumenta 2009, p. 206 – 208

(extract)

Well that’s us, that’s the way we live having fun as much as it goes.
The sadists, the masochists. We laugh, cry, screw, shave ourselves, love and hate each other, take drugs, show off, lick, drink, hope, leave each other but we are still here. Yes, we are living on the edge, there’s no doubt about it.
And that’s why they don’t talk. They don’t say a word. Were we to observe – using special optic what’s going on in a flat across the street, we would be likely to see more than hear. Well, that’s the fate of the voyeurs. (…) Elaborate music mix and projection keep the structured net of scenic images together.
The film is shown with the use of the raster effect, on the oblique white surface of coulisse. Fragments of the block’s facades are accompanied by tired human shadows, by many times heard sounds and voices which we rushed by everyday haste let vanish irretrievably in the very first second of their conception. Somebody is running down the stairs, someone is taking a lift, everybody is making a phone call, while in the real life actors stick to the music and a particular space. Impact of all aspects involved is very artistic creating a well balanced composition.

(...) It is no easy to express oneself by a movement. Even more difficult may be to return from a dramatic conversation exclusively to the expression of the body and do not slip down to what was or has been here. The SkRAT people have always had invention. Their testimony is old-new, yet different. It can be current by the expression of topicality within stereotypicality, particularity within abstraction, sadness within a joke or vice versa. It is good that their snooping is not hasty, that it is experienced, analyzed. Simply, it is real.

Eva Andrejčáková, SME, 9. 12. 2008