In a primitive world – perhaps prehistoric, perhaps posthistorical – a community of dirty, ragged, half-naked but mask-wearing men and women is shocked by the arrival of a mysterious, enormous creature that has fallen into a large trap built by the tribe just outside the village, a pit filled with sharp spears pointing upwards. Its breathing can be heard from afar and the gigantic animal gives off an unbearable, repulsive stench. Everyone rushes to see the creature, even the Venerable Man, a “skinny old man”: he is alive, despite having been pierced by the sharp points. The Venerable Man commands it to be struck with spears and then with poisoned arrows and a shower of stones, but the creature does not die. Slowly, men and women begin to get used to the presence of the Monster, they no longer find it so repulsive, indeed its stench – which now permeates the whole village – is considered a perfume that gives a strange happiness, an unknown joy. They say that by breathing it “(…) all fear disappears, all anguish and all sadness. And the physical pains also disappear. The old forget that they are old and the sick forget their illnesses. He heals all ills, heals souls”. Only Nob can’t stand the Monster, his breath, his smell, the change of the rest of the tribe. Meanwhile, the Monster grows, takes up more and more space, forcing the tribe to move the houses and fields further away…
A metaphorical creature that takes control of the consciences of a people, of an entire society; a manager in a suit and tie – designer of intricate motorway junctions – who finds himself in a Mad Max nightmare in which nomadic tribes walk endless abandoned highways full of fossil cars, now useless; a disenchanted and depressed doctor who is faced with a mysterious epidemic that drives the infected to suicide (M. Night Shyamalan, are you listening?); a blind and a deaf who hide unmentionable secrets in their past. These are the bizarre protagonists of the four short plays collected in this volume by the Swiss publisher Casagrande. The curator Marco Lodoli writes in his preface, “Kristof forces us to remember that we live in the catastrophe and we almost always do our utmost to repeat it, increase it, spread it. She is so ingrained in our life that we find it hard to go against the tide ”. So is there no hope in the world of the Hungarian writer by birth and then exiled to Neuchatel? “Does Kristof really conceive of existence as a senseless factory of pain?” Lodoli wonders again. “Evil is here and we feed it, transmit it, worship it? Luckily there is still some noble heart that resists and opposes it, a few grains of sand in the atrocious mechanism. In each of these plays, the simple and clear voice of dissidence rises”.
