Oliver Czeslik

Cravan is a play about legendary boxer-poet Arthur Cravan, the “King of the failed characters”, who was gentle as an elephant and light as a butterfly, but still a ruffian, for he preferred being knocked out by a real boxer to being put under the yoke of military insanity. So, he was a renegade, fleeing his whole life from the daily small wars, dodging World War I between 1914 and 1918. At the end of December, Cravan took the steamship “Montserat” from Barcelona to New York. The journey on the barely seaworthy ship is the framework for a plot that revolves around Cravan and Trotsky, who took the same steamship to America and remembers meeting Arthur Cravan in his memoirs: “There are quite a few deserters from all countries, mainly of high standing. A painter got his paintings, his talent, his family, his wealth out of the line of fire under the protection of his old father. A boxer, who at the same time writes novels and is a nephew of Oscar Wilde, openly confessed he’d prefer shattering Yankee chins in an honest, sporting fight to having his ribs stabbed by some unknown German… The others: deserters, adventurers, speculators or “undesirables” thrown out of Europe. Who else would get the idea to cross the Atlantic at this time on a lousy old Spanish steamship?”
Czeslik’s play turns the authentic background of the meeting between the boxer-poet and the Russian revolutionary, who was pursued by spies even then, into a tumultuous roleplay, in which Cravan is the anchor point struggling in a web of political and erotic entanglements.