PURGATORIO To 9 April.
London.
PURGATORIOurgatorio: To April 9
by Romeo Castellucci
Barbican Theatre To 9 April 2009.
Runs 1hr 30min No interval.
Review: Carole Woddis 9 April.
Darkening at length.
What price realism, what price narrative theatre? That’s the intriguing question Romeo Castellucci has posed this past week. Castellucci’s
Performance theatre has long been the poor relation of British theatre. We like our theatre, on the whole, realistic. We like a good story. Performance or Live Art theatre or `physical theatre’ often runs counter to these axioms. A Castellucci scholar, Nicholas Ridout points out in his programme note how Castellucci’s work is not just about powerful visual images, though that’s unquestionably his hallmark. It’s about the creation of a world. How you relate to them and where they take you is the point.
It would be easy to liken the watching of this second part of the trilogy to purgatory itself. As an audience member, there are times when it feels that way. The action is slow to static. Dialogue, such as it is, is barely discernible. If you consider purgatory as interminable, this is it. Stasis. The storyline also appears deceptively domestic, banal even: a sickly child, a mother preparing dinner, a bedroom, a husband returning home from work.
But then things imperceptibly darken. The husband asks for his hat, a stetson. He takes his small boy by the hand and reluctantly they climb the stairs of the smart, open-plan house. For an agonisingly long period, all you can hear are muffled sounds, bumps and a child’s voice growing ever more pained until there is a sudden scream. Then silence.
The most uncomfortable 10/15 minutes you will ever spend in a theatre, the discomfort comes from imagining what is happening. The subsequent 20 minutes include an extraordinary orbital vision of a flowery paradise transmutating into a tangled mass of fetid vegetation out of which the father’s face and arms emerge. The end is deeply ambivalent; the son, now older, prostrates himself on top of his stetson-wearing father who writhes in a fit on the floor. Is it an act of forgiveness or revenge? The orb turns black before acquiring a golden corona. Blackout.
The First Star: Irena Radmanovic.
The Second Star: Pier Paolo Zimmermann.
The Third Star: Sergio Scarlatella.
The Third Star 2: Juri Roverato.
The Second Star 2: Davide Savorani.
Director/Designer/Lighting/Costume: Romeo Castellucci.
Original Music: Scott Gibbons.
Choreographers: Cindy Van Acker, Romeo Castellucci.
Choreographic assistant: Tamara Bacci.
Collaboration on Set Design: Giacomo Strada.
Sculptures/Mechanisms/Prosthesis: Istvan Zimmermann, Giovanna Amoroso.
Images of Heaven: Zapruder filmmakersgroup.
The project has been funded with support from the European Commission and many other international festivals and collaborators including Paris Calling, a Franco-British season of performing arts.
2009-04-11 01:17:39