In the panorama of the great theatre festivals, this one of the Venice Biennale, running until August 5th, seems to be still one of those who want to look for, discuss, get passionate, with a director, Antonio Latella, so the research in new territories is a necessity and not just an opportunity to show.
This year the theme that links the shows, then, is very interesting: "dramaturgies". and it is now accepted by all that under this name there is no longer only the text, but a plurality of languages and scripts is articulated scenic. The fact, however, is that you risk losing a strong sense of identity, a center of gravity around which the "dramaturgies" must work and grow.
And the proof is the Venetian program of these early days, if a performance without words, where some real and fantastic characters are involved in situations increasingly paradoxical and cruel, up to a grand guignol final as that of the Belgian Miet Warlop (Mistery Magnet) or a children's show, also here a nice sequence of sarcastic gags on the theme of war (War by Jetse Batelaan), even awarded the Silver Lion.... , mingle on a par with a text by the magnificent author of the writing that is Heiner Muller or with the dizzying work of verses and ideas that a young man like Leonardo Manzan has done on Cyrano (Ciran must die, to be seen absolutely). But we are at first impressions.
The opening performance, much applauded, was Mauser by Heiner Muller, the most difficult and indispensable of the German writers, the Brecht of our years, a writer who in his work has developed a strong dialectic confrontation with the ideology, myths, utopias, with the certainties of fundamentalism, opening up doubts, often bitter and pungent glimpses. Forgotten in Italian theatre, the Biennale has rightly chosen to present it in the year of "dramaturgies" with two works, Hamletmaschine, directed by Sebastian Nubling who will be seen, and, precisely, this opening Mauser staged by Oliver Frljic, director until a few years ago considered scandalous, radical, "dangerous", here working with the actors of the Residenz Theater in Munich.
Mauser is an acute and painful reflection on the theme of revolution but also of the inhumanity that every revolution contains and of "if" and "how much" violence can be done for "the good of humanity". We are in Witebsk, during the Russian civil war: the initial scene is a soldier who piles up corpses on top of each other and then makes his proclamations. And from there is an esclation of dead. A soldier of the revolution is commanded to kill all the enemies, but when he becomes pitiless in front of three poor peasants (the scene of bringing them to their knees behind barbed wire is beautiful), he himself becomes the "enemy" to be killed, the counterrevolutionary to be annihilated. "To death all the enemies of the revolution", and the slogan that continues to echo in the show, "we must rip off a lot of grass, so that others can grow".
Muller is not interested in taking positions in favour of revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries. Mauser was written in the early 1970s and presented for the first time in 1975, when his intellectual relations with the political authorities of East Germany were very much opposed, indeed Muller was never welcome in the DDR and Mauser long censored. It is a sort of didactic drama in the wake of the lesson but also of his criticism of Brecht. Unlike the "Master", Muller insinuates doubt in his works. If his texts have no tragedy and therefore no catharsis, his reflection goes deeper, in that much more tormented and profound area, where reasons and doubts mix, utopias and nightmares come together, justice and violence on the individual can be the same thing. Mauser, which is a very hard text, tells exactly this: he insinuates death into the revolutionary thrusts, forcing us to a lucid confrontation with the dreams of change.
Frljic adds much of his own, perhaps too much, to his staging: he feels the need, at some point, to bring the drama back to his history as a Bosnian who lived in Croatia, a "fascist country", as he says, which is in Germany without wanting to become German. He stages himself in a character who is quietly watching what happens but eventually comes forward, he also wears an SS uniform and talks about the scandals he has caused in his career. If that weren't enough, his very physical theatre here makes his actors do everything: sweaty, naked, they make more characters, in the end they even cut pieces of wood; he involves the audience in the disturbing scene in which the soldier, who has to die, naked, turns among the spectators staring at them in the eyes while slapping them on his buttocks; he cleans his body after having feasted on it...
