Marco De Marinis on Saint Joan of the Stockyards, “Il Fatto Quotidiano”, April 28 2024

Staging Brecht today: ErosAntEros succeed with a complex text
Marco De Marinis, “Il Fatto Quotidiano”, April 28th 2024
https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2024/04/28/mettere-in-scena-brecht-oggi-gli-erosanteros-ci-riescono-con-un-testo-complesso/7524335/

“It takes a certain amount of courage to stage Brecht in Italy today (it is done less and less, due to the commonplace that reduces him to the standard bearer of a political theatre that is now anachronistic) and we must give credit for this to the ErosAntEros company from Ravenna, led by Davide Sacco and Agata Tomsic. Moreover, they have chosen a difficult text that is not without its pitfalls behind the apparent didactic linearity: Saint Joan of the Stockyards, written between 1929 and 1930, i.e. in the years when Brecht inaugurated the ‘epic theatre’, marked by a strictly Marxist vision of society and art. […]. For some time ErosAntEros has dedicated itself to a theatre of civil commitment, questioning the role of the artist in society, without ever neglecting formal research and expressive innovation. In this demanding multimedia production (with a profusion of live videos and film clips) in four languages, Sacco and Tomsic, who on stage is Joan, bet on the topicality of Brecht’s work, continuing to deal, as in their previous works, with the great crises afflicting the contemporary globalised world, where classical capitalism has taken on the less blatant, but no less treacherous and ruthless, face of neo-liberalism. Decisive in the performance is the powerful on-stage contribution of Laibach, an historic musical group from Slovenia, who are entrusted with the role of the ambiguous Black Hats, the Christian Salvation Army in which Joan is militant, with a felicitous directorial intuition.”