Shooting Rats

The play starts with a mod young couple arriving in a gadgety sportscar. The man has picked up the girl and now wants to satisfy two passions at once, rat-hunting and sex, so he can express his feelings as both man and killer. He put the car together all by himself, but when it was finished he realized that it had lost its importance to him. Now he is eager to take a woman apart, like a car, in order to really get to know her. He talks of their isolation, of the distance between them.

They agree to a game of taking each other apart, of tearing away everything that hides their naked selves. An aggressive psychological strip-tease starts. Then they engage in a systematic self-revelation: first to go are their false hair and teeth, then their money and cosmetics and finally their clothes – they throw everything into the rubbish surrounding them. Then they are ready in their ugliness and nakedness, for each other. In the midst of their ecstatic love-play they are shot by two proffessional rat-hunters, who take them to be rats.