THE CABINET: A puppet show CALIGARI adaptation

In Robert Wiene's silent, expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an evil hypnotist (Werner Krauss) roams from town to town using his somnambulist slave (Conrad Veidt) to commit a series of murders. Wiene employs supremely distorted sets (when the buildings don’t look like they’re about to flop over and melt, they look like they could eat you alive), kooky camera angles and exaggerated makeup that leaves the actors looking like walking expressionist paintings. The result is one of the strangest and most haunting films of all time.

Perhaps the idea of a stage puppet show version of Caligari sounds ridiculous, but there's nothing hokey or comic about the production mounted by Chicago's Redmoon Theatre. The show doesn't attempt to hide the puppeteers, and the various sets fold out like pop-up books and then snap shut for the next scene, making the somnabulist's tortured existence even more surreal. He is literally a puppet dangling from strings, in a world that never stops shifting around him.

(Via Super Punch.)

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