Seven cooks, four soldiers and three Sophias by Simona Semenic / costume design
p r o b l e m a t i c s
A story about the real martyrs, their hangmen and those cooking for all of them, since the beginning of time
The lives of three women, three Sophias from three quite different historical epochs are told together to create a story of bravery, sacrifice and selflessness. Sophia Magdalena Scholl, Sophia Lvovna Perovskaya and Marie-Sophie Germa- in are presented to the audience in their final hours, before being beheaded by a group of soldiers. Seven cooks observe, comment and peal potatoes, the way they have been doing since the beginning of time. The cooks are witnesses to all the crimes but they are wise enough to know that these three more deaths mean nothing in the grand scheme of things because the potatoes need to be peeled and soldiers need to be fed.
Dramatic text with a distinctive authorial form and specific play and drama conversion between the history and fictitiousness of drama text. The text is dedicated to three historical figures, the fate of three remarkable women who have made a significant mark in human history. German, Russian and French lived in different centuries and countries, but had a similar fate and the same name. They were relentless activists and intellectuals who had fought against violence, ignorance and inequality of all kinds for a lifetime and paid a high and cruel price for their beliefs. In a unique universe, true information about these persons is thus uttered, while at the same time the dramatic text remains true to what it is: fiction. It talks about a close chain of friends: passivity, fear of the other, execution, war, and last but not least, history or the past. The lurid dramatic paraphrases of these historical individuals are captured in the dramatic text by Simona Semenic between storytelling, chatting, arguing, commenting, scolding, admiring, resenting, daydreaming... seven cooks preparing food for the soldiers on the front and four sold-in-charge of execution of all three rebellious Sophias. The author denounces war, conformism and bureaucracy while analyzing the position of women within (patriarchal) society.
The thing that shocked me exceptionally was that men-soldiers (except the last part in which they play close Hans’, Sophia, the first one’s brother, relatives) only deal with killing the innocent, from the perspective of the times I live in, women, repeating over and over again phrases about being tired and about hard work, by no means for moral reasons, while women take care of their meals (cooks) or aspects of life important for humanity (Sophias). Soldiers become specific only in the last part, after the execution of Sophie Magdalene Scholl, when one of the cooks and one of the soldiers play some scenes from her life.
The result is that the text of the ‘Seven cooks, four soldiers and three Sophias’ does not give any specific dramatic time or space. On the contrary, it is perfectly avoided and gained at the universality of wars and its participants (such and different), but at the same time it is far from the general, the incomplete and the flawed, mainly because of the Sophias.
The group of seven cooks (the peevish one, the huffy one, the fat one, the dainty one, the pedantic one, the boring one and the pensive one) is a group of eloquent but completely inactive women of all wars throughout history. They have adjectives instead of names, they introduce themselves and explain why those adjectives are their names, but in fact they have most of things in common, differences between them are basically details. They sit, peel potatoes and fill a dramatic text with a whole list of clichés, prejudices, wisdom. They have succeeded in convincing the world and themselves that they are a group of old humans who live their lives as commanded and they abhor any responsibility to the world and to others. On the contrary, their daily routine is to produce food for soldiers, which means that they are the kind of machine that drives war at all.
The text creates a unique universe of almost constant state of war.
Estimated number of needed actors 14 (4 male, 10 female)