After Magritte

We catch Harris and Thelma, a married couple, and a mother (not clear whose mother she is) in an unusual situation: Harris is standing on a chair blowing into the opening of a lampshade, Thelma, on her hands and knees, is staring into the floor and occasionally sniffles, while the mother is lying on the ironing board. Through the window, a policeman who has already informed his superior about the suspicious group is staring at them.

Tom Stoppard (1937), British playwright of Czech origin, conceived his comical one-act play After Magritte in the vein of the new reading of particular characters in literature and painting, and took to transfer Magritte's surrealist paintings into drama. In structuring the drama act Stoppard thus takes Magritte’s form, yet in a way that ensures that the situation in which the characters were originally painted (no matter how absurd) is explicable also in the medium into which they have been transferred. But the play wasn't just created after Magritte; the surrealist also otherwise permeates the presentation of the unusual situation in which the suspicious group is caught. After all, the act itself in placed into a time after a visit to a gallery, or after Magritte.

The surrealist comedy which begins and ends with a scene that takes inspiration in Magritte’s painting compositions will see its first professional staging in Slovenia in the direction of Ajda Valcl.