“Schizo” – psychological thriller at Kellerteater

Psychological thriller

Cast: Meelis Kubo, Elina Reinold, Liis Haab

Author, director and sound designer: Vahur Keller

Scenography: Britt Urbla Keller

Choreography: Kristina Paškevicius

Lighting design: Rene Topolev

Make-up artist: Evelin Sulg

Graphic design: Britt Urbla Keller

Marketing manager: Annika Land-Reisser

Stage masters: Riho Rosberg and Dmitri Divak

Executive producer: Jane Oksa

Chief producer: Vahur Keller

Planned duration: 2 h 30 min, with an interval

Premiere on 27 November 2022 at the Kellertheatre.

The performance is in Estonian, without subtitles.

Staging of the play is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

The Kellertheatre’s new production “Skiso” is a psychological thriller inspired by the life of Edward Theodore Gein, the “Plainfield ghoul”, by Robert Bloch’s story “Psycho” and by Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name.

The motif of a man who lives with his dead mother has haunted director and playwright Vahur Keller for several years. The way the dead control the lives of the living is, besides good archetypal dramatic material, also a very vital and timelessly relevant theme. All the people who matter to us live on in our memories: sometimes we have dialogues with them, and sometimes they give us advice. People who died long ago still influence the destinies of whole nations. Sometimes their bodies are not buried but preserved after death, so that people can go on living and communicating with their ancestors physically, in the same room.

What happens when another living person appears in the consciousness of someone who lives only with the dead and communicates mainly with them, and who does not always behave as predictably as their earlier life partners?

This course of events can also drive the dead out of their minds.

Fitting for the Kellertheatre, the planned production explores what may have taken place inside the mind of Ed Gein, who ended his life in a psychiatric clinic, and the blurred boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead.