Vandals

A one-act chamber play packed with action. Milieu: a defence bunker furnished and armed for the family’s safety where the trapdoor is secured with various alarms and traps. Time of action: June 17th of the year 2087 Length of the performance: 1 hour 45 minutes not including an interval. The Vandals is a savage, amusing, rough, black humour play aiming for a balance between the imaginary and the prophetical, the lyric and garbage, where a coin only serves as a piece of costume jewellery, and hard currencies are arms and food. The action takes place in the last phase of our culture after the crash of civilisation, in the year 2087. Competing tribes have settled amongst the ruins of buildings, in the midst of the leftovers of the old world. They fight for survival, setting traps, joining forces, trading with food, arms and sex. A nuclear family consisting of a father, mother, two daughters and a son live in a bunker defended by traps. The mother exchanges the canned food which the father and children have found for a shotgun. As soon as the children are taught by their father how to use the gun, they turn it against their parents and shoot them. The substance of everyday life is the appeasement of basic needs; the law of the jungle enforces the rights of the stronger: the question is should mom and dad ultimately be pot-roasted or simply eaten raw. The moral code has been rewritten; the meanings of the former culture have been shattered; glimpses of the historic civilisation come to surface as loose fragments and shreds in the parents’ behaviour. The speech of the young is also ragged, their sentences are recycled language, where the meaning of words has long been forgotten. (Tinfo/Sunklo)