“And I had gone, though my body still lied motionless on the bed.”
The anti-hero of Vyrypaev's play July is one day deprived of everything by a fire. And so, he sets out to fulfil his dream – to live out the rest his days in the Smolensk asylum. His pilgrimage, on which he destroys and kills everything he gets his hands on, has been made into a puppet play by graduates of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava.
The author has prescribed the monodrama for interpretation by an actress, and the puppet concept takes the estrangement one step further. The raw text coming from the mouths of the three actresses who animate the puppet/central character is thus very easily given a cynical distance, bringing a strong comic edge. The people and animals that the man gradually massacres are then brought onto the stage by a fourth cast member. Everything is stylized as a narrative from beyond the grave. As opposed to the anti-hero, conceived as a fairly realistic naked male body (the fire left him nothing else), the other creatures are represented only by deathly fragments. The dog with its skeleton, the pop with the bones of his legs and a skull with its two-metre beard, the wife with the head which the man had struck off.
The topos of a road is projected into the basis of the set design – a road that stretches like a long strip of fabric down the middle of the stage. A variable table stands on it. The table is where the central action of the plot is concentrated (but the action is also played out in the surrounding space, paced by changes in lighting). When the anti-hero, beaten and comatose, reaches the prison asylum, his puppet lies motionless on the table, illuminated by an awkwardly hung, cold fluorescent lamp. In his last moment of consciousness, he is speaking to his mother. After a rigorously constructed estrangement of all previous narrative, a more emphatic, yet sensitive, tragedy creeps into the actresses’ voices.
In the epilogue, a message can be heard from the man’s answering machine, a message left for him by his three daughters – we’re setting off tomorrow, and on July 1 we'll finally be with you, Dad. The actresses come in a different costume, blue jeans and a white shirt, and sit down at the beginning of the road in front of the audience. The peaceful scene and the hope in their faces sharply contrasts with the image that greeted the audience as they first entered the hall – of three women sitting in mourning dresses around a table, finishing a funeral feast.
