There is a special connection between humans and pigs. Gwendoline Soublin has it in her radio play Pig Boy 1986 – 2358. Replay of the Incarnation thought out into the future in a shrill way.
The first chapter takes place in the past, in the mid-1980s, around the year the author was born. Theodor Bouquet dreams of a life as a cowboy. But instead of cattle, he has to deal with pigs, instead of the prairie with his father’s fattening farm. It is being driven to ruin by an even larger company, an international corporation. It is also the time when people start to care about animal welfare.
Even this first story is inconceivable without the mass media – Bouquet’s cowboy fantasies come from the cinema, and his downfall as an entrepreneur is a public spectacle with television as a stage. Seen from today, the second chapter jumps two decades into the future. A pig, Pig Boy, made it to star and influencer thanks to social media. His undoing is that it behaves too human-like.
A pig that pretends to be too human violates species rights
It is accused and sentenced for “violation of species rights” – by millions of people who follow the process via an interface that is presented to them like a reality soap and who decide on acquittal or death penalty according to the like and dislike principle. In the third chapter, well into the 24th century, the pig incarnation had already made considerable progress.
Not only the boundaries between humans and animals, but also between corporate groups, politics and the public are becoming increasingly blurred in Susanne Janson’s staging. It presents a world in which the individual – even the animal – has to bow to the constraints of conformity and mass media. In terms of content, form and aesthetics, the radio play falls into a rapid pork gallop from the very first minute. The attention span for individual aspects is short for social media. Every existence is only conceivable as entertainment.
Pig Boy 1986 – 2358. Replay of the Incarnation, NDR Kultur, September 22, 2021, 8 p.m.