Maria Dolores Pesce on Saint Joan of the Stockyards, “Sipario”, April 21 2024

SAINT JOAN OF THE STOCKYARDS – direction Davide Sacco and Agata Tomšič
Maria Dolores Pesce, “Sipario”, April 21st 2024
https://www.sipario.it/recensioniprosas/item/15817-santa-giovanna-dei-macelli-regia-davide-sacco-e-agata-tomsic.html

“The intelligent staging of Ravenna’s company captures the complex and even sudden changes in this ‘System’, the so-called globalisation, the changed appearances of a structure that remains what it has always been, the exploitation of man by man, which has however become even more unequal, with fewer and fewer richer and many poorer and poorer, so much so that it has become a war against humanity as a whole, from a class struggle to a war against humanity as a whole, with the climate crisis being a single but representative example. It is written explicitly in the theatre booklet: ‘the truth that the German playwright was trying to unveil is that of robbery in the interests of the few, hidden under the appearance of an order that presents itself as unchangeable and constituted for the good of all, a robbery of which we are both victims and executioners.’ Sometimes, I would add, simultaneously. The first essential element of this transformation in the full fidelity of St. Joan of the Stockyards is the multilingualism, envisaging the staging of three different languages (Italian, Slovenian, [German] and English) as a reminder that we now live in a ‘global’ world but also in many ‘small homelands’ closed in on themselves. The second is the use of music, played live by the group Laibach, in this, which is not one of Brecht’s dramas set to music, and which ‘rewrites’ the fabric of the text in sounds that are not only very modern but above all harsh and penetrating, creating an extraordinarily alienating environment in the Brechtian way (detaching oneself from the epos in order to understand it).”