The Force of Habit

A tragicomedy / Czech premiere

The story takes place in the caravan of a circus director, Caribaldi. He had an idea a long time ago that he would learn Schubert’s string quintet The Trout with his employees in their free time. Since then he has been trying to make the Juggler, Tamer, Grand-daughter and Clown, who have no relationship to music, learn to play the piano, violin, viola and double bass…

The Power of Habit is about a desire for absolute perfection which is, however, in irreconcilable conflict with banal, everyday, humiliating reality. The play approaches a farce in its comicality, and with its variations on the repetition of situations it is also close to a slapstick comedy or film grotesque. The protagonist of this absurd theatre, similarly as in other Bernhard plays, is a dominant male figure whose megalomaniac and hence unrealizable desire for perfection becomes a cruel as well as ridiculous obsession with which he tyrannizes and depresses his environment and also himself.