WHY?
From a personal perspective, Roberto Zucco continually shouts one question; ‘Why?’ Why does one kill ones own parents? Why is a child more powerful than a monster? Why does love hurt more than violence?
While a film noir angle is used for the aesthetic perspective, from a moralistic point of view Koltes’ world does not operate in black or white, merely in shades of grey. In this play, nobody is simple, no move is obvious. Feelings, motivations, words and acts all have their own independent lives but individually each is an enigma which tells an unspeakable truth.
Characters are like a clear but bottomless water: when you think you have understood their essence, sudden unexpected changes make you view them in a different light. Even then their wounds and their crimes appear beautiful and become so much more disturbing.
The casting has been crucial, I have had the luck to find amazing actors and actresses perfectly able to express this electric ambivalence of the divided self and this essential physicality - Zucco is also a story about attraction and repulsion between different bodies. The magnetic charisma of the characters is channelled through the real stage presence of the cast, engaging and entrancing the audience to a level vital in such a play.
Precise lighting and set design will help to create an abstract and expressionist world, based on stark contrasts and symbolic objects, where concrete bodies meet, live, love, cry and die, in this full and empty modern Fin de siècle, which reflects our time.
11 DIRECTIONS FOR A LABYRINTH
1.
Film Noir has been used as a reference point for intense visual effect, concentrating on suspense punctuated by moments of extreme emotional violence.
2.
The use of a reduced palette on stage bringing the black and white world of German expressionism and film noir, and within this tight control allowing moments of intense colour creating stark visual contrasts. Extreme lighting techniques creating excessive lights and shadows, silhouettes, using basic film lighting techniques.
3.
Using Brechtian alienation as a starting point and working with an emphasis on what the audience can’t know: That they can only watch a façade of the characters complex, often contradictory, “inner selves”, thus creating a paradoxical situation of both intimacy and exclusion of audience.
4.
Bringing the techniques of film editing to the theatre by use of sudden black outs for scene transitions, creating a pacy rhythm and stark juxtapositioning of tableaus.
5.
Emphasis will be laid on the few moments of intense physical violence in this relatively actionless play, forming part of the stark contrast, which is at the centre of my conception of the play.
6.
The almost schizophrenic nature of the lead part will require difficult acting techniques to provide the sense of divided self.
7.
Charisma of the antihero, which seduces the voyeuristic audience only later to make them aware of their collusion with the violence on the stage, by subtle manipulation of auditorium lighting.
8.
Using abstracted geometric shapes of the cityscapes as a backdrop with a stripped stage with only a few essential objects. Also use of recordings of the city as an audio environment.
9.
Encouraging actors to go beyond the usual “in persona” techniques of acting and to generate a visualization of the environment of their character.
10.
Picking the right actor for Roberto Zucco has been extremely important and needed someone with an awareness of the possibilities of multiple personalities within one persona. The magnetic charisma of Zucco is based on a huge, and often silent, stage presence.
11.
Roberto Zucco in the ADC Theatre. The size of the ADC has been essential in creating the atmosphere Koltes generated in this play. It centres around urban cityscapes and needs a sense of isolation, of dwarfing the characters by their environment, losing them within it. The physicality of the piece, the coincidence of meetings and the scenes of rapid escape require something larger than the intimacy of other spaces. Hopefully the size of the audience will also create the sense of a crowd as a backdrop to the individuals’ struggles and the isolation of the antihero.
Gerald Garutti
