Comedy About the End of the World: in Eleven Languages

Comedy About the End of the World is a farce about a farce, within which is a further farce. It is a farce in the way that our reality is a farce, although, as its hero says: "it is no time for farces. Reality demands serious dramas." Reality demands, as the writer precisely ascertains, that we ask ourselves about the end of the world, that we ask ourselves whether we need to plant and fence off our own vegetable garden or continue to plant only grass - and sell it on... On the edge of town in a house with a neglected garden, in an almost Beckett-like setting, this is exactly what four people are asking themselves; all of them are marked by their own imaginary theatrical reality, but all of them are also easily recognisable from our direct reality. The tenant Joe Orton, a playwright manqué, the owner Elvira, an actress manqué, the new tenant Majerhold, an undercover environmental scientist, and Konjevic, a man with various false identities, cannot agree about the purpose of the garden or about saving the world, and thus the author's anything but optimistic dramatic forecast of how to solve current social problems on the threshold of the end of the world makes it clear that, as so often before and in spite of apocalyptic warnings, in the battle between principled innovators and unscrupulous profiteers, the latter will triumph. Moreover, in response to a dramatic text with skilfully honed dialogue, bursting with aphorisms and intelligent word games, we are led to ask what is actually real both in the play and in general, who is genuine and who is undercover and, above all, whether the end of the world is an approaching reality or merely a behind-the-scenes battle between different interest groups - a battle in which revolutionary scientists and exploitative profiteers alike are operating underground. In a fresh, unobtrusive way Comedy About the End of the World thus deals with the most burning global-local issues and vividly portrays the spirit of the times at both home and abroad; in doing so, it hints that all the world's a stage and so we may never know the answer to the question from the title of Orton's unwritten drama: "Why have all the fucking values gone to pot?"