The Loop starts with a simple activity: SHE goes to her husband to the hospital with a packaged meal in hand. The LPG fuelled mini-bus, two stops in the forest, and then the hospital. An ordinary route turns into a bodily and worldly dysfunction at once: the smell, the nausea, the cramp, the lack of air, the panic. The heroine gets off the bus too early, kneels beside the road, and breathes as if not only making it to the hospital depended on it but also holding herself together.
It is a drama about a mechanism, not “action”. The drive is repetitive as if it were a symptom: the breath starts a signal, the signal starts an escape, the escape starts a comeback, and the comeback ends with going down. The hospital, the bus stop, the shop, the arrows, the water distributor, the elevators, and the corridors are not the background but a labyrinth that acts as a live organism. The horror lays in the infrastructure: in what was meant to guide and help and starts to lead astray, turn back, suffocate.
The text is of polyphonic nature. One character is split into a choir of daily roles: a lady with a Pekingese, an aunt, a buddy, a nurse, a guy, a boyfriend, a shopkeeper, a therapist, a neighbour, a masseuse, a “woman” from the bar, and voices coming from the TV on top of that. Everyone is saying “for goodness”, “normally”, “please breathe”, and their language turns into another form of pressure. Humour is what’s operating the most efficiently: dry, cruel, enjoyable, when the tragedy must buy potato dumplings, marshmallows, and water and the world has no other metaphysics for it aside from a receipt.
The Loop has the precision of a dream that doesn’t want to end: the same places come back from another angle and the body is a compass that always shows fear. The water becomes an amulet, number 13 sticks to the prices and gestures, and a stone under ones hand has more truth than all those calming formulas. It’s a theatre where daily life is not realistic but ruthless: everything is “normal” until somebody doesn’t try to get some air. And it is a play about how a person starts to live through every day only when they start pretending to control the map: the elevator, the arrows, and the water distributor aren’t natural but they have their own character, their own violence. The greatest terror doesn’t have sharp teeth. It has rules and a voice that says: “please breathe”.