Masters: Everything Is Already There

An underground passageway with pipes and metal tray running along teh ceiling. A silhouetted person is wearing a VR headset.

The way in is the way out*

* a Pythagorean inscription from antiquity

The story is set on an island. The characters are there for a reason. They have entered themselves for the online show “Win Yourself”, whose participants are taken to a remote place and given difficult tasks to test themselves, to discover their strong and weak points, and to learn whether they can face challenges which require overcoming one’s fears. Anxious and hopeful, they board a plane, looking forward to an exciting adventure, fame in the media and winning the main prize: participation in an even more challenging programme. What they do no know is that they are being used as testers: their personalities are meant to help form algorithms for credible characters in the virtual world. Living people will serve as avatars of characters in a computer game.

Due to a failure of the plane, the situation gets out of control. They land on an island where no-one awaits them; there are no spotlights, no anchorpersons. The pilot shoots himself in the head and dies. The confused passengers try to understand what has happened. They learn that they cannot return to the familiar world because it no longer exists. No-one will fly them back to their comfort zones. They have to stay on the island, and the perspective seems less and less inviting.

However, the virgin territory offers them a chance to create themselves anew, to personify whatever version of themselves they prefer. The realisation that they have been intended for models of virtual characters only fires their imagination in toying with their identities. Can this be effective? Can false assumptions provide the basis for genuine relations with oneself and other people?  Can the islanders be reconciled with the situation, accept the emerging truth and build a new world on new principles? Will they find the courage to explore the inside as well as the outside and to relinquish the position of masters of the island? As new life grows from decomposed matter, so they will have to start from what has decayed within them. They will have to acknowledge that the values they have professed so far are a violation of themselves.

The island forces the inhabitants to come up with new mythologies, new archetypes, new narrations. But new entities, even when created with the utmost care, always reflect the consciousness of their makers. No activity can change it, unless a transformation takes place inside. The word apocalypse comes from a Greek verb meaning “to reveal, unmask, strip off”. The end of the familiar world gives the characters an opportunity to strip off what is old and to reveal what is new, even if it means living in ignorance. If they accept this, if they let go and renounce the power relations between a human being and nature, a human being and spirituality, a human being and corporality, they might begin their passage from POWER to LOVE.

Although the project has a media show as its starting point, it does not concern the mechanisms of that type of entertainment. The focus here is on the game as a metaphor for psychological transformation.

Creative Team

Script | Magda Fertacz

Direction | Konrad Dworakowski

Set design | Marika Wojciechowska

_dsc4385_fot_klaudyna_schubert-kopia_intro
_dsc4783_fot_klaudyna_schubert_intro
_dsc4245_fot_klaudyna_schubert_intro
_dsc4416_fot_klaudyna_schubert-kopia_intro
_dsc4400_fot_klaudyna_schubert-kopia_intro
_dsc4705_fot_klaudyna_schubert_intro
Contact us
VAT Teater MTÜ
National Library Theatre Hall
Tõnismägi 2 (location)
10122 TallinnEstland

Mail address: Endla 3, 10122 Tallinn

VAT No. EE 100 744 512
(+372) 6 450 959
(+372) 6 307 272
Logo of the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union