News

ASDFDFGGGG

ASDFDFGGGG

by

Alistair Maxwell

ASDFDFGGGG is a brilliantly titled piece of puppet theatre from a company of students from Osijek’s Academy of Arts and Culture. Set in a small bedroom, it tells the story of The Writer, a bespectacled puppet with a shock of ginger hair who has woken up with one thing on his to-do list and one thing only: write something, anything. What follows is a short, sweet, and funny piece about oodles of procrastination and the catharsis of a good old-fashioned breakdown.

It’s a perfectly normal day for The Writer. He gets up, he has breakfast and all he has to do is write. So, he does the dishes and then gets right down to writing – after putting on some inspirational music of course. But after that, with nothing now standing in his way, he boots up his computer and… gets up to change the music. ASDFDFGGGG is an amusing take on a struggle as old as the written word: writer’s block. The play takes its unpronounceable name from the letters The Writer slams out on his keyboard with his hands and in one case, his head, in one of his many writer’s block induced piques of rage.

Supporting The Writer is a cast of puppet performers so talented that it’s very easy not to notice that there are in fact four of them. So quickly do they swap roles and positions and sneak on and off the stage with ninja-like stealth that it really does feel like The Writer moves of his own accord.

Of course, if The Writer could do anything of his own accord it would certainly be to write. Instead, he spends the play looking for inspiration in the works of Winnie the Pooh or Superman comics, only to quickly discover that his little stories, after a moment of inspiration, become identical to the adventures of the honey-loving bear or Man of Steel.

After trying all the usual tips and tricks to break writer’s block, such as running a parkour route round his room and trying desperately to obliterate his laptop on the ground, The Writer has exhausted all options and himself. He has a breakdown. All the levity extinguishes, and we can see that despite his lack of inspiration, he really, really does want this. And after a moment of tears, and a moment of silence. He scrapes the laptop off the floor and finally, eventually, begins to write. Having shrugged off all distractions, eschewed all attempts at plagiarism and wrecked his entire flat he is bowed, beaten and broken enough to let his soul pour forth onto the page. It's a surprisingly emotional ending to a very funny show and one that raises as many laughs as it does grimaces of recognition from all the writers in the room. If this is an example of what the students of Osijek can create, then it looks likely that Croatia’s cultural future is in fine hands.