User reviews

The first thing you notice is the score, which is pre-recorded. It starts out as a trio, featuring an oboe with the reed in backwards, playing random notes, but the oboist soon gives up and most of the score consists of a duet between a piano, played by shooting snooker in the case, and a microphone taped to someone's belly to record the borborygmus. How the audience did it remains a mystery, but some of us were able to remain asleep during the proceedings; I could not.

Batalion in a dive bar in Prague, where the dregs of society come to get drunk. Among them is Karel Heisler, Doctor of Law and former member of the Parliament, who has gone on the sauce since his wife cheated on him. We get to know the other occupants of the bar, thanks to some one having got his hand on an optical printer. Their poverty, their hopelessness. Finally, Heisler gives one of patrons, just released from hospital with terminal tuberculosis, enough money for a hotel room; the fellow is shot by a cop. Heisler sobers enough to appear in court to accuse the cop, but no one cares. Heisler becomes the hero of the bar.

It's a tract against the evils of the world: alcoholism, official indifference, the ten plagues of modern society. It ends badly, of course. Hectoring rants always do. At the end, after all the important people have officiated at the burial, only the drunks are left to mourn.

And the people who managed to sleep through the score, of course.