What I liked
What I didn't like
My overall impression
“The case ended on April the 23rd, 1931. The jury retired for an hour and a half. Peter was sentenced to death 9 times. The judge said that Peter’s crimes had been committed in cold blood, and that during the trial he had created the impression of cleverness, calmness, and considered deliberation. ‘Peter Kurten’, he said, ‘is normal’.”
As human beings, we define ourselves by that which we are not. Sometimes this distinction translates as a list of exceptional abilities: rational thought, language, building skyscrapers. Other times, it is what we don’t do that seems most critical to our distinction from the natural world: Humans don’t kill each other for fun. We don’t eat each other humans. We don’t engage in rape as our primary mode of procreation. And we certainly don’t destroy our young. That is, until one of those bleak and occasional moments when someone comes along who does. A nightmare figure who, by the sheer heinousness of their actions, commit what Noel Carroll famously called “category jamming…a breach of the norms of ontological propriety.” Put simply, these are the type of people who commit acts so vile that decent people who hear about them are inclined to say to themselves (most likely in self-assurance), “that person isn’t even human.”
Normal tells the true story of perhaps one of the most notorious of these “inhuman” figures: Peter Kurten. A German man who, at the time of his execution in 1931, had committed at least 9 homicides, as well as a string of rapes, attempted murders, assaults, and acts of arson. The great majority of these crimes were committed against women and young girls, and Kurten took a chilling delight in each and every one, famously reporting a spontaneous sexual climax during his murder of 9-year-old Rosa Ohliger with a pair of scissors. Now being mounted by Los Angeles-based theatre company The Vagrancy as part of the 2017 Hollywood Fringe Festival, Anthony Neilson’s unflinching script (which originally premiered in 1991) remains as subtly and poetically disquieting as any play you’re likely to see this year.
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