Blood on the Cat's Neck

Opening November 2017 on the Small Stage

An alien from outer space descends to our planet. Assuming the name of a 1960s comic book character Phoebe Zeitgeist, the creature sets out to meet people. She comes across a variety of people and listens to their monologues and observes how they relate to each other. Listening to them silently and attentively, she learns the words and phrases of their language enabling her to explore how democracy works.
Phoebe gets to know a wide range of people of various occupations (a police officer, a butcher, a model, a teacher) and life stories, such as a wife of a fallen soldier, a poor girl, and, last but not least, two vendors of love. All are ordinary, low- and middle class people, some are less and some more fortunate, and they speak in the same breath of love, loneliness, business, pain, passion and the purpose of life. Their dialogues are short and quick, their relationships are crude, fleeting and superficial. They talk about love, contempt, affection, fear and anxiety while they curse, plead and say goodbye. Phoebe picks up a few words and possibly an entire phrase or a thought from each of the Earthlings she meets. When she finally ends up at a party, she addresses people with their own words, and is met with comical misapprehensions, tragic misunderstanding, contempt and total indifference.
During his short life Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who is better known to Slovenian audience as a film maker, was strongly involved in theatre too. Blood on the Cat's Neck was first staged in 1971 and quickly earned a reputation of an anti-theatre piece presenting a critique of language and speech as systems of social subordination of an individual. The play, skillfully combining the banality of everyday life with a conflict, regarded as a primeval human drive, and with cheap sentimentalism of pop culture, functions as a veristic image of a chaotic world in which we live.