Isola Teatro (IT)
“In an unstable Europe marked by a crisis that has become a permanent existential condition, the tragedy of the individual, whatever his national and linguistic identity, in the face of a ferocious modernity, speaks to us and about us more than ever,” says director Marta Gilmore. “The enemy, the other, the borders, now that people die to enter Europe and end up choking on debt to stay there, are words that deserve new questions, nourished by the awareness of a past that is still painful”.
Friendly Feuer is a show/performance for a collective writing on the relationship between the Europe of today and that of a hundred years ago, at the dawn of the First World War.
The lens through which to look at the events of that time is the condition of those who tried in vain, more or less consciously, to escape that “total war”: deserters, soldiers suffering from war neurosis, soldiers from opposing sides who made informal truces, and so on.
On stage, the many possible declinations of the “friendly fire” that gives the work its title, in a fragmented and choral narration, a European polyphony with an aesthetic sensitivity that uses contemporary languages to dialogue with history, avoiding the rhetoric of celebrations. Thus the individual stories of desertion, war neurosis and suicide are juxtaposed with questions relating to a precarious and in its own way ferocious present.
Concepts such as enemy, foreigner, cowardice, courage and homeland are combined in the past and present, without providing exhaustive answers. Meanwhile, the interpreters switch from one language to another, mixing different dialects, in memory of a generation of often semi-illiterate infantrymen who went to arms in the ‘world of yesterday’.
Direction and dramaturgy by Marta Gilmore based on a collective writing; with Eva Allenbach, Tony Allotta, Armando Iovino, Marta Gilmore, Vincenzo Nappi; technical director Andrea Gallo; production Isola Teatro; with the support of Centro Didattico Musicale, Rome; Crowdarts, under the High Patronage of Istituto Svizzero, Rome.
Isola Teatro began its activities in 2005, with the staging of L’Isola, by the South African playwright Athol Fugard, directed and translated by Marta Gilmore. Since then, the company has staged La strada ferrata (finalist for the Premio Scenario 2007), with which the group began to measure itself against a work of collective writing and dramaturgical construction. This path continued with Brucia. In 2010 the group debuted with Senza Lear, a rewriting of the Shakespearean tragedy from the point of view of the king’s three daughters, a project that won the Lia Lapini Prize 2009, and took part in the REACT! project promoted by Santarcangelo dei Teatri. In 2015 the collective took part in the project Caryl Churchill, Non normale non rassicurante, curated by Paola Bono, with Bluemotion, Accademia degli Artefatti and La casa d’argilla teatri, curating the mise en espace of Sette bambine ebree by Caryl Churchill. Her latest production, Friendly Feuer (a European polyphony), premiered at the E45 Fringe Festival in Naples 2015.