In a room in a small flat in a dilapidated 1960s block of flats, there are scratches, smudges, fabric torn here and there, peeling paint, a frayed cable, a broken outlet, a warped drawer, and overflowing closets. Here we find the belongings of students, freelancers, mothers and their children, seasonal workers, grandmothers, artists, university professors, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, family members, wild parties, arguments, sex, moments of happiness, and moments of despair.

This room is a record of time. Over the course of fifty years, generations have come and gone within it. Political systems and economic crises have altered its value. But over the past fifteen years, it has undergone a tremendous frequency of changes. A space that, for most of its existence, used to be an affirmation of middle-class prosperity is today a refuge for a new, majority class of precarious workers, caught in a vicious cycle of pressure to increase their productivity. Amid constant changes in work routines, work locations, and temporal and economic uncertainty, they remain trapped in a psychopathogenic environment where camaraderie is their primary source of relief. ‘Every generation will live better than the previous one’ is the paradigm of capitalism, yet today’s generation of precarious workers survives on mutual solidarity and, in the best, albeit rare cases, on the legacy of previous generations’ prosperity. They move in senseless circles with no prospects as they persevere in their exhausting work, hoping for just compensation someday in the future.

“What can we do when nothing can be done anymore? The answer is irony. Dystopia can be overcome through irony,” writes the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi Bifo. Sisyphus draws inspiration from such a room in our city, a place where precarious workers of different generations, classes, and life stories once intersected. Commissioned for this production, Maša Pelko’s script is a collage of fragmentary stories featuring real-life protagonists of our contemporary, fragmented era. At the intersection of these theatrical elements, a production featuring songs emerges, one that uses the language of irony and humour to explore the tragicomic perpetual motion of the modern precariat.