Theatre displeasure touching society’s raw nerves: Castellucci and Frljić

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The essay analyses the political tactics of two innovative European theatre directors, Romeo Castellucci and Oliver Frljić, and their use of displeasure as a theatrical tool. It shows how they decentre the spectator’s vision of the world and shape theatre as a specific producer of truth as defined by Alain Badiou in Handbook of Inaesthetics: thinking about art is not extrinsic; it is art itself. Exploring their work and audience reactions to the performances of On the Concept of Face in Paris and Vilnius, The Curse in Warsaw, Our Violence and Your Violence in Vienna and Sarajevo, this essay shows how they transform theatre into a weapon of political action using the displeasure and offence of the audience as artistic tools. The actors provoke the audience in order to generate a response and their involvement. Their performances thus generate discomfort and sometimes violent responses from the audience within various theatrical, cultural, and political contexts. To achieve their goal, Castellucci and Frljić use radical means: religiously motivated image-making inciting extreme reactions, insulting the audience in a specific version of parabasis, and resurrections producing defamiliarization. They deliberately blur the line between reality and fiction, convinced that the performance is the result of interaction between the performers and the audience. Thus, they destabilize the social distribution of power reflected in the theatre.