Scenes from the realm of loneliness.

A mother enjoys a close and playful relationship with her young children.

This intimacy is gradually lost as the children grow up and create their own lives, be it through going abroad for studies, entering the work force or building families of their own.

The use of new languages and new media, coupled with changes in lifestyle and society, widen this gap of communication.

Mama, on the brink of depression, turns to her cat for consolation and company, and begins to join the pet on its nightly wanderings.

The impatient children grow agitated by these wanderings, but deny the root of the problem.

They blame the animal for their mother’s estrangement, hunt down the cat, and finally kill it in a frenzy of projected guilt. The cat problem is solved.

But to what end?

Director Martina Winkel (Theatre Ohne Grenzen, Austria) presents this daringly postmodern reinterpretation of theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun’s classic Mama Looking For Her Cat, almost twenty years after its debut. Exploring the universal marginalization of the old in the twenty-first century, this multidisciplinary work moves seamlessly from stage to screen, blending the simplicity of minimalist theatre with dynamic multimedia design featuring clips from the original 1988 production and live video performances streamed directly from Austria.