This is the author’s first full-length play which was presented as a reading at the Betty Nansen Theatre, Copenhagen during 2001. The bases for this play are the carers and the residents of the home for elderly people “Frydendal”. With great authority and a formidable style Lollike brings stanza of gentle poetry in touch with the starkest of realities: blood, vomit and old men’s nappies, the impotence of having to face the declining years and the definitive end: death. The old people pass the time in a state of uselessness. Bierman is spitting blood and can hear voices; Don Otto is blind and smokes fat Havana cigars; Senile Vera is 81 years of age and embarks on a love affair with her 23-year old carer, Valentin. The singer sings nursery songs in a shrill voice. Frau Frauke is in charge of the residential home. She uses size 44 and wears shoes with a patent-leather heel and in a mixture of simple-minded openness towards the elderly people and constructive vision she wishes to build a look-out turret which will put “Frydendal” on the map of the world. The jaunty carers Bernhard and Oh Walter who steal from the shelves of the residents and who force the elderly people to swallow a wrist watch keep the play at the sarcastic – realistic level and introduce us to the day-to-day affairs and boring bureaucracy of the residential home. The play alternates between quiet calm, philosophical passages and grotesque scenes in which the dentures take over and surrealistic intermezzi with processions and songs. The text is written with some gusto and gives a close look from the forecourt of death with its brief rapture, and long periods of waiting with its struggles and hallucinations, its deception and disclosures.
