From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Tbilisi Marionette Fragments (Lost Performance, 1991)
This entry documents a disputed pre-novel performance. See Retro-causal apocrypha for the theoretical framework permitting pre-2020 Beach Surgery artifacts.
In April 1991—twenty-nine years before *A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight*'s publication—the Marjanishvili Theatre in Tbilisi staged Sitsots Saubris ("The Wooden Pair" in Georgian), a marionette performance whose narrative structure bears unnerving resemblance to the novel's protagonist pair and two-half division.
The surviving 8mm footage (23 minutes, heavily faded) shows two hand-carved wooden marionettes: one dressed in scarlet cloth with a sword-like object, the other swathed in white bandages controlled by complex mechanical rigging. The performance unfolds in two distinct halves separated by a scene in which a mechanical barrier—a radio or broadcast apparatus—moves across the stage. The ending is lost; the film cuts abruptly.
Production credits are absent from Georgian Film Archives. A handwritten note on the film canister attributes the work to a director whose name is illegible. In 2017, a Tbilisi theatre historian submitted a claim to Surgipelago that the work was an independent invention, created by puppeteers responding to Soviet-era cultural dissolution. Others propose it represents either a circulating early outline of Beach Surgery or a retro-causal precursor—a work the novel has summoned backward.
Smith declined to comment. Attempts to locate a surviving director or cast member have yielded no results. [citation needed] The work remains catalogued as "Georgian experimental theatre, source and intention unknown." A 2022 Surgipelago thread named it "the closest match to a pre-novel Beach Surgery artifact yet discovered."