Crutches and knives

It sounds like a joke but the grannies don’t find it funny. They have a problem on their hands – serious bodily harm. They have attacked the minister for social affairs who had introduced a new scheme for seniors. And now they are desperate. Will they be freed, with the help of young dr. Klupps, or will they really go behind the bars?

The exceptional play by Anita Augustin combines a detective story, black humour, and encounter with a borderline trauma, with a playful addition of some elements of cool drama, disturbing imagination, fatal fire and burnout, all in an exceptionally built story that will keep surprising you until the very end. Despite the age of the characters, the play is not afraid to tell things that the society does not want to hear. The young souls in the deteriorating old bodies refuse to end up in a dump pile of cultivated wisdom, stiff limbs, and “sun in the soul”. Anita Augustin tears apart the image of kind grannies reconciled with life and onset of dementia. It is an indictment of civilization’s prejudices and the system in which we are forced to live since our youth, as perspective and hard-earning taxpayers who are expected to nurture families and mainly to contribute to the system with our productivity and usefulness. To a system that invisibly eats away our own souls. Eventually, the play is not about a burnout that comes with old age, but one that already teenagers could be familiar with.

The author is a dramaturge signed under productions on leading scenes in Austria and Germany. The drama was successfully staged at the Ruhrfestspielen show of new plays in Recklinghausen and then at Schauspiel Frankfurt. The theatre is staging it in a Czech premiere in an excellent translation of Iva Michňová. Anita Augustin studied theatrology, philosophy, and German at the Vienna University, had received prestigious scholarships in New York and in London. Besides other work (professional photography) she had also become a post-graduate student of a leading bartender.