The vertigo of animals before going off to the slaughterhouse
Questions are the root of the world.
Dimítris DimitriádisTranslator, actor and director working in France and in Italy, Caterina Gozzi has surrounded herself with a troop of seasoned actors in order to restore all of the original fascination of this play. The most banal of events and the most unthinkable, meet up at the same crossroads. On one side of the intersection, a handful of humans beginning the most ordinary of mortal stories. On the other side, a trinity of mysterious and anonymous characters, simply designated by the letters A, B and C. The identity of the humans at least, is obvious to us: they are mortals, subjected to the life-stories of mortals, and are distinguished by their first names.
The members of the trinity of voices are much more difficult to identify. Are they gods ? Is this what a conversation between immortals would be like if we could transcribe it into the language of mortals ? In any case, these voices seem to be sovereignly indifferent to the logical patterns of creatures that are prey to the inexorable flux of « becoming ». They articulate the incomprehensible, fascinating and vaguely terrifying laws of man. Where are they speaking from, these voices that seem to be spoken with no need for sense and reason, insensitive to the seduction of truth, but that keep a running and cold commentary on the frightening effects that truth has on the humans, who cannot live without the quest for truth? They make claims where madness and lucidity seem to intertwine - and yet they comment on, and even secretly orient, the action that continues to unravel in the daily lives of the mortals. And this is where Nilos and Militssa find themselves. They form a couple like so many other couples. They are young, they are in love, and they are going to get married. But when Nilos announces the good news to his old friend Philon, everything takes a strange twist. Philon first tries to dissuade Nilos to start a family, as if Militssa were an implacable rival. Then, when Nilos refuses to hear him out, Philon adopts a different, incredible strategy. He predicts for Nilos, his future wife and their children, a horrible destiny : after a period full of joy and prosperity, they will lose everything and fall into the pits of insanity, incest, murder and suicide.
Twenty years later, the prophesy still has not come true. Nilos and Militssa have three grown children : Emilios, Evgénios and Starlet. Nothing out of the extraordinary in their perfectly harmonious lives and so the couple decides to invite Philon to come and celebrate their twentieth wedding anniversary with them. And suddenly, certain telltale signs start appearing, the long-awaited catastrophe betrays its imminence, while the mysterious voices begin to speak again, in order to make an announcement...the most ancient aspects of Greek tragedy haunt this work by Dimitriadis, like a half-forgotten dream : fatality, both implacable and absurd, unravels through the power of poetry, which merges together, with astonishing mastery, the trivial and the oracular.
