Helmut Krausser

Roy Bar—the words were once written in crooked red letters on a blue wooden door in the middle of the harbor of Valletta. And for Roy, a well-to-do pianist, bored with life, love, and success, that was no accident. On a whim, he simply bought the Maltese red-light bar which bore his name, and got drunk there while his lover Alice waited in a hotel, full of bad premonitions. Since then he has never stopped drinking. Not even on the concert tours, which Alice has already stopped attending. And not even when the music began to run away under his fingers, as did the affection of his playmates.

Now Roy is back in Roy Bar, fallen out of time and memory onto the hard barroom floor of the dingy pub. And here, he begins to meet people from his past. His beloved Alice appears to him, who took her life for his sake and whom he cannot forgive. And the barmaid, whom he apparently hired at some point but can no longer remember.

A beauty in an evening dress appears. She left him because he drank instead of passing on his talent to their children. A man with a hangman’s cap, another ex-lover, waiters and waitresses, the former owner of the bar, and the prostitute Malicia, whom he more or less condemned to death on his first night at the Roy Bar - a bizarre dance of the dead and undead. And all of them have crossed Roy's path at some time. But when? And why? And why does each of them come bearing a different truth? In this whimsical scenario, accompanied by the constant chants of the seven drunken baritones, Roy slowly finds out how things really were. Or as they might have been?