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"Who are you having for lunch today?" If you were stuck on a raft with no food and two strangers for company how would you survive being devoured by your companions? What is the proper way to decide whose rump and sirloin finds its way to the dinner table? Cannibalism has never been so democratic. In 1960 s censorship ridden Poland, satirist Slawomir Mrozek was forced to find many unusual angles with which to carry his biting comments against the Soviet regime. One of his regular techniques was to write absurd comedic plays that carried a dark message beneath the laughter. Perhaps his finest one-act effort is the little known, Out At Sea. Written in 1962 (and translated by Nicholas Bethell in 1969) this single-set black comedy traces the fortunes of three very different castaways who attempt to find a democratic way of deciding which of them shall be eaten by the other two. The arguments become steadily more outlandish, the bullying and sycophancy more intense, until the intervention of a passing postman and an old manservant take the play into a hilarious surreal overdrive, building to a chilling climax.

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Author: Slawomir Mrozek

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2006 (1 listings)