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ErosAntEros’ interview by Natasha Tripney, “SEEstage”, May 4 2024

ErosAntEros: Bringing Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards to the stage
Natasha Tripney, “SEEstage”, May 4th 2024
https://seestage.org/interview/erosanteros-bringing-brechts-saint-joan-of-the-stockyards-to-the-stage/

Italian theatre makers ErosAntEros on their ambitious staging of Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards featuring live music by Laibach and the challenges of international co-productions.

Saint Joan of the Stockyards, Brecht’s reworking of the Joan of Arc story in the stockyards of Chicago following the financial crash, is a challenging work to stage. Influenced by Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle and written between 1929- 1931, the play is a scathing critique of capitalism. The text as written requires multiple performers and musicians. Previous production have featured over 70 people on stage as striking workers. It’s easy to see why it’s not often staged.

An ambitious new version by Italian company ErosAntEros and Slovenia’s Mladinsko Theatre has attempted to meet these challenges head-on featuring live music composed for the show and performed live by the cult Slovenian band Laibach.

The show been many years in the planning. ErosAntEros’ – actress and dramaturg Agata Tomšič and director Davide Sacco – have been working on the production since 2017. This is not their first attempt at Brecht. They had previously created a piece called On the Difficulty of Telling the Truth, based on Brecht’s 1934 essay Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties, a text written after Hitler’s rise to power, when Brecht was in exile. “He was directly addressing the intellectuals of his age,” says Tomšič, “to react to fascism and capitalism. He put them on the same level. He said that fascism is just the worst consequence of the capitalistic system.” “When capitalism wants to be kind, it is capitalist, when it wants to be more directly aggressive, it is fascism,” adds Sacco. “They are the same system.”

It is, they say, a very timely piece. One that relates directly to moment we are in now, which is why they intend to revisit this text and this performance in the future. “In this text, Brecht is talking about telling the truth,” says Sacco. “In Italy, it’s almost forbidden to talk about Palestine. If you do you will be censored.” By way of illustration, he describes the protests in Pisa earlier this year in which protesting school children were beaten by police in full riot gear, leading to several being hospitalised.

All of which is to say is that Brecht’s work and words have been very much at the forefront of their thinking for some time, when they started to explore the possibility of staging Saint Joan of the Stockyards. “We tried for many, many years to convince different theatres in Italy and Europe to find the concrete economic production possibilities to put this text on stage,” explains Tomšič.  As conceived by Brecht, it’s a huge undertaking, with 60 actors on stage playing the workers. “There are a lot of practical and economic barriers to staging something like this, especially for an independent company,” she says. “It is not affordable, from an independent perspective in Italy, and even from an established theatre, productions of this scale are not common.” […]