The Woman before

a fateful tragicomedy

This season, director Alžběta Burianová will present a work by the recognized and most-often-performed German playwright today. It is a unique combination of horror, poetry and the grotesque. In the words of the author, it could be called “Nightmare – A Comic Case.” A three-member family – forty-five-year-old Frank, his wife Klaudie and their son Andy – are in the final stage of their preparations for moving overseas. The last crates and boxes of things are waiting to be taken away. Andy still has to say good-bye to his girlfriend, while Frank and Klaudie have the last evening ahead of them in the flat where they spent the whole nineteen years of their marriage. And then the doorbell rings – there is a woman outside. Romy Vogtländer had a relationship with Frank twenty-four years ago, during which Frank swore eternal love to her, and now she has returned to hold him to his promise. The author develops this surprising situation, which causes various unexpected complications, using an original dramatic technique that ignores the chronological order of events, allowing the observer to encounter different phases of the story and view individual situations from various perspectives. As a result, while at the beginning this play seems to have all the trappings of a typical farce, it gradually acquires a frightening dream-like atmosphere, a fateful dimension reminiscent of the classical dramas of antiquity...