#umbraculum

[skylarkswift]

Inktober day 4- Spell An umbraculum witch ✨

[loquaciousliberal]

Boredom (And How It Is Literally Satan)

Recently I co-wrote and starred in a play called Umbraculum as part of my Drama and Theatre Studies A-Level. It was a surrealist piece set in an air raid shelter, and I played The Administrator, a sadistic, brutal nightmare character who may or may not have been entirely the creation of another character's mind. It was a lot of fun and hopefully the examiners will like it as much as the audience did. But Dominic, I hear you ask, why are you starting off a post entitled 'Boredom' by telling us about your A-levels? Well Tumblr, it's time for another of my musings on life. See, Umbraculum carried a very obvious, blatant message: it was a protest piece on the nature of modern warfare and its tendency to blur the line between soldier and civilian. We wrote it to carry that message and boy did it deliver it. But when I was helping to write Umbraculum, I wanted to make another point, buried as subtext under that powerful message. I'm a fan of Thomas Hobbes' observations on human nature and his belief that without the structure of social convention, human life would be brutish and short. It was this belief that inspired a large part of the later stages of Umbraculum - how a small group of people, cut off from normal society, either create their own conventions to live by, or in the case of The Administrator and the rest of the survivors, regress into violent, animalistic beings without any societal structure. But when I was creating and playing The Administrator, in my head, it wasn't the isolation or freedom that caused him to murder and torment his fellow man. No, The Administrator did what he did because for the months and months he spent underground, he got bored. Speaking as a hyperactive moron, I slipped into character perhaps easier than I should have done. The night before the final performance, I locked myself in the bathroom, in the dark, for an hour. I didn't bring my phone with me, and it was bloody cold in there. After half an hour, I was doing flannel origami. Then I put the flannels away. Forty five minutes in and I was toothbrush drumming. By the end of that hour, I had exhausted every entertainment option I could think of in that bathroom that didn't involve me getting dirty, wet, or hurting anyone else. As I said, it was really cold in that bathroom, and dark, but that wasn't what got to me - it was the boredom. Once I'd left the bathroom and got into my bed to get warm, I pondered what I might have done for entertainment had I been stuck in that bathroom for two hours. A day. A week. Six months. I imagined what I would have done if there had been the four other people trapped with The Administrator in there. That's when I clicked that what The Administrator was doing in the shelter was pretty bloody tame for someone who should have been so very bored. There's an Administrator inside all of us, I say. Want to let him out? Go lock yourself in a cold room for an hour and see what happens.

[therurrjurr]