The World Seen from a Snail's Horn

The world through a fool’s warm gaze

This play is about the part of life that is easy to lose but must never be given up. Like so much art that places humanity’s last hope in love, it argues for the recovery of humanity — paradoxically, through two “fools.”

Gi-ran is less a fool than a man who has shut himself off from the world after his wife, three months into their marriage, took her own life following a gang rape. Suk-ja is a fool by birth, a pure soul who cannot comprehend the world’s shadows and malice. One day she finds Gi-ran left among piles of rubbish, talking of the sea, birds, stars and fairy tales of his hometown, and falls for him completely. Their love blossoms on top of a landfill.

Around them are twisted figures of a society distorted by rapid development: Suk-ja’s father, greedy for land and money; her half-sister Ok-jin, who hates her and covets their father’s fortune; Tteok-bong, a rapist on the run hiding at the dump; a cultist old woman; and Ha Dal-geun of a land-fraud gang. As schemes swirl around the land, the father is ruined by the fraudsters — while the two fools, needing no pretence, find each other.

Created by playwrights, directors and actors in their twenties and thirties, the production took on the ills of industrial society, used a chorus of “spider people” symbolising human greed, and experimented with storytelling and puppetry, contrasting characters through computer music, harmonica and ship’s horns.