Details

Is eating people a right thing to do?

To eat, or to be eaten? Let’s question this cannibalistic world

About performance

A Madman’s Diary is based on the homonymous novel published in 1918 written by Lu Xun, a Chinese literary giant. Lu Xun claims that ‘eating’ is not only the action of chewing down what comes to the mouth, but also the action of a person forcing someone into submission using violence. From 1918 to 2018 today, or maybe for a longer time than we realize, the ‘cannibalistic society’ in which people eat people has only been maintained. In order to settle for the reality in front of us, we neglected and adapted to the brutal history of continuous cannibalism. In this day and age of living through unchanging ‘cannibalistic’ disasters repeated in similar chains of cause and effect, we need to stay alert for oblivion and at the same time know that proper means for documenting memory is urgently needed.

Written in 1918 by the great writer of China Lu Xun,  exposes, in the form of diary, the hypocrisy and inhumanity of Confucian society through a story of an obsessed man who thinks people surrounding him want to eat him. Realizing one day that he has been living in a ‘cannibalistic society’ and starting to show anger and will of resistance towards the world at large, he learns, through the violence of the society done to him, that the underlying problem is that the world has helplessly adapted to the unreasonable, old system. However, through the madman’s action of eventually compromising with reality, we see a slice of ourselves in the present day. Witnessing the history repeating even after 100 years, we reach the realization about what we have neglected and what we have adapted to while living in this society.

Synopsis

On a moonlit night, ‘I’ feel that the people surrounding him are watching him in a strange way. The dog next door, children of the village and even his own family look at him very strangely. At the moment of pain due to gradually suffocating attention and behaviors to him, ‘I’ realizes that they are trying to eat him…

Credit

Director / Su-jung Kim

Original / Lu Xun

Dramaturgy / Rhyoung-za Cin

Stage Design / Sang-ho Lee

Lighting Design / Hae-in Yoon

Costume Design / Mina Kim

Music Design / Yul-goo Lee

Sound Direction / Min-bae Jeon

Photographer / IRO

Video / Young-min Park

Producer / Do-won Yi

Cast / Ji-yeon Kang, Mina Kweon, Bo-kyeong Kim, Seon-gi Kim, Pyung-joe Kim, Hyung-jun Kim, hyun-gi Min, Hyung-bum Park, Jae-seong Ha

About company

The Theater Maker New World is a group of young artists who want to experience a new and credible world. It aims to set free the truths that this era would prefer to conceal. Without any restriction of subject or form, the company tries to present the stories of our time through our body and language.