JAAN UNDUSK NÄITEKIRJANIKUNA
Jaan Undusk as Playwright

Summary/Abstract: This essay attempts to chart in broad outline some of the more obvious themes and compositional techniques used by Jaan Undusk in his four plays. The radio drama „Sevilla, La Giralda” presents the dichotomy of the body and the soul, while teasing the reader with the ambiguity of secular as well as saintly – and actual as well as fictional – figures of Spanish life and literature both now and in the past. Of Undusk’s straight plays, „Quevedo” focuses at first in rather realistic terms on 17th-century Spanish culture and politics (or brains and brawn). Eventually, however, the play modulates into a surreal vision of existential hell, suggested at least in part by Nietzsche’s use of the word „desert” in Also sprach Zarathustra. „Boulgakoff” concentrates on the vicissitudes of the writer Mikhail Bulgakov in 20th-century Stalinist Russia, while drawing certain parallels with Molière and the „Sun king” Louis XIV in 17th-century France (and alluding as well to Soviet Estonian writers). A possible key to at least one significant layer of action and dialogue in „Goodbye, Vienna (Gertrud)” may reside in a single word in Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia in Shakespeare’s well-known tragedy. The word „body”, actually meaning „machine”, with overtones today of „body-machine” in such works of visual art as Leonhard Lapin’s „Woman-machine X” or such dramatic works as Heiner Müller’s play „Hamletmachine”, may provide a clue to the plethora of sexy and sadistic language used by Gertrud (another possible allusion to Hamlet) in Undusk’s best-known play.

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