Small Duties is a shocking and daring poem about violence against women and social expectations of victims. It is a story divided into three parts: Revue, History, and Investigation. Its main characters are Natascha Kampusch and Elizabeth Fritzl, the so-called basement girls, who were imprisoned and tortured for years. After their release, they became a kind of macabre “celebrities.” They were judged, re-exploited by the media and pop culture, and subjected to social pressure. For the author, their painful stories are only a starting point for broader reflections on the mechanisms of violence, its sensational, neurotic, scandalous, and deliberately erased voices and manipulated images. The poem thus highlights the performativity of violence, exposing both what happens around high-profile cases and the fact that European cultural heritage is built on the exploitation of women.
The first part, entitled Revue, presents the characters, introduces the protagonists, and provides details about the shocking abductions. It is a critique of the patriarchal world order and theater as a medium that feeds on violence and aestheticizes it. The second part, History, is a pastiche of a crime series, where poems serve as its successive episodes. It is a story about the dramatic fate of the Fritzl family, and at the same time a critique of the media and pop culture, which profit from human suffering. The last part, Investigation, is a series of gruesome crime mysteries, a kind of vivisection of events, an attempt to answer the question of how it happened and who was to blame. It also questions the functioning of the police and the justice system. Each part is also linked by the character of Elfriede Jelinek, a writer famous for her depictions of violence. By invoking her, the author discusses the so-called obscene in both prose and dramatic writing, but also reveals the mechanism that causes an author writing about violence to become the target of media attacks herself.
Joanna Oparek has created a poem which, due to its polyphony, powerful, evocative language, moving images, and dramatic narrative, is certainly suitable for a full-length stage production and, most interestingly, provides enormous scope for the director's imagination.
“Where the matter ends, theater begins,” writes the author, and it is worth noting that the text is metatheatrical in nature. Oparek directly refers to theater in it, both as a subject and a form. She uses the revue genre, employs dialogues and monologues, uses theatrical terminology, and discusses the “theater of death” and the post-dramatic turn. She invokes names familiar to drama and theater – from Shakespeare, through the aforementioned Jelinek, to Kleczewska and Lupa. Small duties contains elements of macabre burlesque and horror, psychological crime fiction, mask lyricism, as well as sharp social satire and serious criticism of contemporary culture.