Pre-paradise sorry now (Little Stories of Everyday Fascism)

The Italian Motus group was founded in 1990 and today it belongs to the progressive groups of independent theatre. In its thematically corresponding productions it focuses on current socio-political issues and in open theatre forms it quite often searches for means far beyond traditional theatre.

For its newest cycle Motus chose theatrical and film piece by Reiner Werner Fassbinder who is known in Slovakia mainly as a theatre director. Apart from the Pre-paradise Sorry Now there is also the Rumore Rosa based on the play Bitter Tears by Petra von Kant. While the Rumore Rosa is a closed staging form, Pre-paradise Sorry Now counts with a constant making up. It is not a mere theatre production; it is more – a theatrical research that reaches the stage of never-ending formal and contentual search; i. e. the part of the production is a „video-catalogue“ which tries to find out what the meaning the „everyday fascism“ covers.

The fragments of Fassbinder´s films and projections of war pictures are also the meaning of an interaction with the spectator which becomes more than a mere presentation of the story within one theatre night. By an acute and provocative way, it goes under the skin of the spectator whom it has promised to wake up from an ignorant sleep.

When we imagine that Hitler would live today or that mass murderers have become pop-icons what can our reaction be? What is our attitude towards violence – from the most significant one to the hidden, every-day one? What possibilities do we have to express ourselves against violence and do we really want to do it? The real story of mass murderers Myra and Ian became in the 1960s an inspiration for Fassbinder to write a story of human cruelty. The name, Pre-paradise Sorry Now is an allusion to the famous production of the Paradise Now by the American off-off Broadway Living Theater Group, in the late 1960s a significantly left-oriented theatre calling for utopia about better society freed from capitalism and fascism, enthused by the spirit of the hippie revolt. It is somewhere here that we can find the starting point of the Motus´s production which goes beyond the frame of the Fassbinder´s play and makes it topical thanks to a radical view from the perspective of our days. Our problem is not only the ineradicable fascism manifesting itself in the story of Myra and Ian who found their inspiration in the atrocities of the Nazism.

It is also the 1960s revolt, with its anarchistic calling for freedom and liberty, that seems as unable to be fulfilled and many times as turned- to-the-opposite utopia. An anarchistic gesture, it is a total release of the most aggressive violence instincts. What are our real morals like? Let us ask this question while the freezing production by Enrico Casagrande and Daniel Nicoló can convict us of our own hatred against individuals or groups, against “enemies” who become a screening sheet of our own ferocity.
Martina Vannayová