Brecht, refugees, the end of the world: two shows with Lino Guanciale in Emilia

Two very topical plays are the ones Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione is organizing for this and the coming weekends, both starring actor Lino Guanciale and both world premieres: two original productions, produced with the support of Gruppo Hera, that debut this month. The first is titled Dialogues of Refugees, is a reading of the work of the same name by the great Bertolt Brecht and is staged Oct. 6-11 at the Arena del Sole Theater in Bologna (Tuesday 6 through Friday 9 at 9 p.m., Saturday 10 at 8 p.m. and Sunday 11 at 4 p.m.).

“Emigration,” said the great German playwright, “is the best school of dialectics. Refugees are most insightful dialecticians. They are refugees as a result of change, and their only object of study is change. They are able to deduce great events from the slightest hints, [...] and have keen eyes for contradictions. Long live the dialectic!” Brecht thus illustrated the relationship between existential discontinuity and the need for metamorphosis, identifying the subject torn from his own system of habits and certainties as the ideal propeller of political and cultural change.

“A true text of the crisis,” Lino Guanciale points out, “a true text generated by a state of emergency. A vivid representation of the bailiwick to which the illusions of stability of Western civilization are subjected, especially when they serve, consciously or unconsciously, to sweep under the rug the miseries and frailties of a world accustomed to despising dialectics as a tool for the regeneration of democracy. A text that has much to say, we believe, to us orphans of the end of history, to whom the pandemic has delivered the epiphany of a dimension of precarity whose roots, we are learning with perhaps too much guilty surprise, are actually much deeper than it might have seemed. It is an unprecedented problematic horizon, to be responded to with the most varied forms of aesthetic and cultural resistance made available by the complexity of theatrical language, just as we see happening to the Brecht of this work.”

The reading is accompanied by a score of music by violinist Renata Lackó, chosen as much from the classical repertoire of European and more Brechtian cultured music as from the “wandering” sounds of the Yiddish tradition, acoustically signifying the complex existential and cultural landscape of the encounter between the two characters. During his years of exile in Northern Europe, fleeing Nazi-fascist power running unstoppably toward its expansive climax, Brecht went through probably the highest and most authentic phase of his vocation as a poet and political dramatist, in which he wrote some of his best-known works. These are the years, in fact, of such works as The Romance of the Tui, Terror and Misery of the Third Reich, Mother Courage and Her Children, Life of Galileo, The Resistible Rise of Arthur Ui, The Chalk Circle of the Caucasus: texts in which the struggle against the inhuman forces of History becomes more raw and effective. Also an offspring of this season is Dialogues of Refugees, finished in 1940: a portrait of uprooting as an existential topos, a tribute to marginality as a matrix of philosophical and political elevation. In Dialogues two “suspended” voices confront each other, that of a scientist and a worker, identified with an ironic compendium of the class struggle, “The High One” and “The Low One”: two “little men” facing History, belonging to opposite fronts of the pre-exile social conflict and now united by a forcibly erratic destiny. They first meet at a station, a symbolic non-place of each other’s fate, and casually engage in an initial confrontation about the relationship, not surprisingly, between man and his passport. From that moment begins a dialectical spiral that leads them, on different days and in different scenarios, to touch on the most varied ethical, aesthetic and social issues related to the world they come from and to what, they wonder might be, the future. Thus, they alternate between comments on hegemonic educational models, personal remarks on life in the dimension of perpetual flight and humorous notations on the relationship between politics and pornography, critiques of the dominant superhomistic ideology and observations aimed at exposing the systemic flaws of a world convinced, drunk on its own will to power, of its destiny of eternal growth. The finale does not decline a precise epilogue of their respective biographies, but leaves open any perspective, from salvation to ultimate ruin, in the wake, however, of a commonality of intent, dreams and visions.

The second show also speaks of crisis: it is La mia infinita fine del mondo, a drama by Gabriel Calderón translated by Teresa Vila, which features Lino Guanciale as director, while Michele Lisi, Paolo Minnielli, Maria Vittoria Scarlattei, Cristiana Tramparulo, Jacopo Trebbi, Giulia Trivero (actors of Emilia Romagna Teatro’s permanent company) will take turns on stage. The show is at the Storchi Theater in Modena from Tuesday, Oct. 20 to Sunday, Nov. 1, 2020: always at 9 p.m., except on the 24th (at 8 p.m.) and 25th (at 4 p.m.).

Reviewing some of the transient apocalypses traversed by the planet and humanity since prehistoric times, including volcanic eruptions and ice ages, universal floods and economic crises of the pre-industrial era, interwoven with the experience of personal precariousness of a small handful of young protagonists, My Infinite End of the World, a work by Uruguayan playwright Calderón who has already worked with Emilia Romagna Teatro, intends to return a tableau of possibilities for relating to the neurosis of the end, placing the emphasis no longer only on the despair that the collapse of a world inevitably brings with it, but on the possibilities that open up each time history returns to teach us that nothing lasts forever.

It is precisely on the experience of the end that the global pandemic crisis has introduced new elements of collective reflection, providing an opportunity for the construction of a widespread awareness regarding the unpredictability of the relationship between man and nature and its consequences on both institutional and personal history. A common thread intimately links the fear of the ultimate natural catastrophe and that of the collapse of our form of life, the current turbo-capitalist system and the certainty of having achieved an eternally stable level of well-being and fulfillment appears today in all its insubstantiality. If, therefore, the current pandemic condition seems to make it clear that the end of history, identified by political scientist Francis Fukuyama with the post-1989 triumph of the Western bloc and its model of development over the Eastern-Soviet one, can be said to be over, one wonders what scenarios now present themselves to us in this time of great uncertainty.

For all information on times, tickets and more, you can visit the Emilia Romagna Teatro website.

Brecht, refugees, the end of the world: two shows with Lino Guanciale in Emilia

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.