Saturday 24 January 2015

The Pillow Man

I offed to see an amateur play, because there's a kid I like and heard great things about him on stage - and i chose a good play to see him in, because layered with the things I am writing these days and things I am seeing (Attack on Titan, hello), this was by far the most fucked up thing I've seen all week. It takes place on a police station, where two detectives are (rather totalitaristically) interrogating a young writer about his short stories. Each of the short stories is pretty darn messed up and most include children getting either awfully hurt or worse. Problem is, someone has hurt children following up his stories and the police is sure it was either him or his mentally challenged brother - whose brain damage was the result of their parents savagely mistreating him in order to support the younger's talent for story-writing.
All the stories are actually really good

- in one a man is in a cage at a crossroads - this one is called 'unsolvable riddle' - one of three cages. Each cage has a plaque on it and in one there's an old man and the plaque says 'murderer'. In one there's a skeleton and the plague says 'rapist'. The problem is, the man can't see what his plaque says. He asks a passer-by what it says and the man just spits in his face. Three nuns come and say a prayer for the skeleton, a prayer for the murderer, but when they read the plaque of the third man, the leave, crying. Finally a  criminal passes and lets the murdered go, but the third man he shoots in disgust.

- another story is of a poor boy with no shoes and almost no food and nasty parents, who sits alone on the bridge, eating a sorry dinner of a small sandwich. A cart comes and he, though chilled by the sight, offers half a sandwich to the cart man. They eat and talk and when the boy looks at the cart, he sees lots of small, filthy and smelly cages. He wants to ask what's in them, but right then the cart man tells him he will give him a gift as thanks for the kid's goodness. A gift he man not understand for a while. He proceeds to chopping off the kid's foot at the toes. It later turns out the man was a Pied Piper, delivering the rats on his own and years later all the kids but the lame one will be doomed.

- The most fucked up is the title story - the story of the cushy Pillow Man. This is a very nice looking pillow creature, soft and comforting, because he has an important mission in life: he come up to people who are about to commit suicide and instead of it, he goes back in time to when they were small children and offers them to get into terrible accidents instead - so as to spare them a lifetime of misery. Problem s, he suffers awful grief for it. And one day he meets his younger self and proposed the same - that the young pillow self, fully aware of the situation, just pours gasoline on itself and that is what happens. They both vanish, but the last thing they hear are the screams of horror of people they thus failed to save from their lives of pain and suffering.

and so on. Like I said. They're all good, just really friggin' messed up. I took mostly just shots of Nejc, because the director of the theater once treated me like shit and wasn't interested in the event as a whole, but all in all, it was a cool play. I just wouldn't recommend it on happy people. Unless they have no imagination, then it's okay, then they won't feel a thing.















This one is badly taken, but i like it anyway, right because it makes him look even more unhinged..








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