A group of soldiers have found shelter in a bombed-out children's hospital near the front. Cold and hunger, fear and boredom rule the riflemen, who have been molded in the midst of war. Toys, medical equipment, musical instruments are found in the hospital rubble, if someone remembers a musical performance from childhood. A story where the world is divided into light and darkness, and people into good and evil. Where a good doctor treats children and animals, but an evil robber loves them dearly. And so begins the game, a last attempt to remember what it means to be human...

Kornei Chukovsky is a well-known children's writer for Estonian readers and viewers. Ellen Niidu and Jaan Kross's 1960s translation was made famous, among other things, by the ETV television show Vandersellid in the 1980s. The material has also been successfully interpreted by Ukrainian filmmaker Davõd Cherkassky, whose 1984 cartoon “Doctor Valuson” is familiar to almost everyone young and old who lived at that time. With the latter in mind, director Peeter Piiri brings Chukovsky’s text to the stage in the style of an absurdist musical, accompanied by live music, of course.