Artistic Discoveries in European Schoolyards

Plays Database

Paperclip Belt

A 16-year-old girl Kati is dead but her spirit is now reminiscing about the times preceding her death.
She used to wake up every morning loathing her alarm clock and going to school where she was not the most popular girl in class. Kati smoked and drank alcohol quite often. She had a couple of best friends. She found one boy, Juhan, strangely attractive. All that Kati had wanted was to be attractive and different. She had never dreamed of fitting into the normal everyday world.
Kati’s younger sister is having a birthday party, Kati invites Juhan to her place to help her keep an eye on the youngsters, not wanting to do this on her own. That night Kati and Juhan make love for the first time.

Soon summer begins. Kati and Juhan have a huge fight and do not speak to each other for a month. Kati decides to go to a party in another city. She eats a strange pill given to her by a boy she does not really know. A little while later, Kati gets raped by the same boy. She stumbles out of the house in total confusion only to see Juhan together with another girl. She runs into the nearby forest and tries to slash her wrists.
Juhan arrives in time to save Kati and drives with her to his summer holiday house. They have a long talk and suddenly find themself enjoying some of the nicest days of the summer.

As autumn approaches, Kati and Juhan start getting ready for school. Markus, the boy who raped Kati, contacts her out of the blue. He announces that he’s HIV positive and suggests that Kati should get tested. A while later, Kati receives the horrible news as well.
Kati starts to push Juhan away, since she is too afraid to talk about her condition. On a rainy autumn day, Kati finally confesses.
A while later, she climbs to the top of a tall parking house, thinking about her bygone freedom. She slips and not having enough strength to hang on to the railing, falls down.

Her sister is standing right there and sees Kati’s body smashing onto the cold ground.

The Webshop

Two 14 years old girl Martina and Mercella meet by chance in an empty playground at night. It becomes clear from their discussion that both are lonely, their schoolmates don’t accept them moreover they are excluded from the company of the schoolmates.

Marcella is a very smart girl, perhaps this could be the problem with her. She competes in school competitions and she wins. She wants to be a mathematician, a space researcher, an astronomer, a brain surgeon etc., this changes every week, however she is talented indeed. Adults are fascinated because of her knowledge and maturity and it seems every way and possibility is open to her.

Her classmates look at her suspiciously, she looks down on them and thinks they are stupid. She communicates only with adults and thinks of herself as an adult in every respect.
She doesn’t have siblings, her mother, a family doctor secretary, has no partner.

Martina is different. She is inhibited though she would be naturally pretty but she tries to deface herself in every possible way, she often changes styles – dark, emo, gothic – in her clothing and attitude.

She is the middle child from three siblings, her parents are workers, common people with little money and even less free time. Her sister has been very sick for years and her parents had to concentrate their energies on this. She hangs out a lot with different people here and there.

Marcella and Martina are very different but they do have one thing in common: boys are not interested in them. Martina is overtly unworried by this. Marcella is secretly very annoyed about this. Both of them regard school as an unnecessary shit.
They discover soon how they can attract attention and win the recognition of their mates: by starting business with medicine, at first with trendy prescribed slimming drugs then with sedatives, stimulants, antidepressants, hallucinogenics.

At first they get the prescriptions easily with the help of stolen prescription pads. They have no idea of the trouble they are getting themselves into. The girls become very popular amongst their mates and they are considered very cool. Their behaviour has changed, they are becoming confident. Marcella discovers the financial part of the business too. She starts to enjoy money and, by using forged signatures, she makes investments.

Their activity attracts the attention of the drug dealers of the neighbourhood and the police as well but for the present non of them can find the girls.

Their business booms so much so that the girls decide to establish a webshop in order to circulate the goods. Dorina, Martina’s sick sister who is disabled and lives her life in front of the computer is involved in the informatics part of the development.

Among their costumers are strangers and adults as well. The clientele starts to become more and more bizarre in the ballet school (Martina takes ballet lessons), in the schoolyard, in the playground.

The two girls are already business-women who realise that they are addicted to their own goods financially but not just financially. For instance Martina makes much more money than her father who is a bus driver.

In the meantime they have problems with purchasing drugs, because the pharmacists have become suspicious. The prescriptions are obtained in a very refined way: they appear in emergency medical centres just before closing time if possible, between two crying infants. They never go to the same doctor, they lose their prescriptions, steal health insurance cards, make business with the prescriptions of their family members and eventually start forging.
Martina doesn’t lie to herself that she hasn’t become addicted to her own drugs, but the smart Martina is the emperor of life until the first sickness which forces to her to end up in hospital…

Salto Mortale

The play is about a young man named Peter and his friends, who have all just finished high school. Peter does not have a good relationship with his father, a former circus artist, and his mother left them a long time ago. Peter is a sensible young man and does not let the environment around him mess with his head, despite the friends he has. One of his friends, a drug dealer, finds dealing to be the easiest way to earn money. Other friends are children of rich and important people and money opens the way to university for them. The play examines the power of friendship, the relationships between young people and their parents, and the uncertainty of the future. The (un)happy ending shows, how one bad decision can lead to a deadly consequence. It is a story about love and despair, the strongest emotions that have to be dealt with by such young people.