by Edward Bond
directed – light design by Mattia Sebastian
Presented at Asti Teatro – 33mo Festival. July 2006
Japan 2007 and on tour in Italy
with
Benedetta Laurà
Massimo Ballardini, Massimo Bulla, Mattia Sebastian,
music Gianpietro Marazza
Eleven Vests shows two stabbings involving the same person, the first as a teenager, stabbing the Head teacher outside the school gate as an act of both retribution and self-defense, the second as an adult, bayoneting to death a surrendering enemy – a further act of retribution. We are asked to consider how the adult creates itself out of its child-self and in what ways authority seeks ownerships and control of that self. How can we learn to take responsibility for ourselves and what we do?
Violence calls violence: this is the moral certainty of this drama that tries to demonstrate the terrible consequences of the innocence of the evil.
In this act we assist with irony and grotesque at the psychological annihilation of a “difficult” guy.
Charged to have destroyed a book in the school library as well as a the school jacket of a fellow, he is driven away from the school by the Head teacher that tries, but only apparently, to have a talk with him.
The student stabs the Head-teacher and in consideration of his good curriculum-vitae, he is chosen for a special military force.
War will became for the student training of an uncontrolled and worth of raise violence.
Between the different scenes the execution of a musical ballade contribuite to give a brechtian feelings to the performance.
The direction underlines the tragicomic of a play that becomes terrible, in a society that from youth trouble build up monster.
An interesting play that uses sour and derision tones, that inform – using the word of Bond – that violence comes alway back with other violence on the ignorance that created it. And we are an ignorant society.”
Mattia Sebastian
