Where does that very thin line pass, between guilt and innocence, between adhesion and collusion, the one that divides who did by who has let it do? How do we identify it with certainty, and to attribute the faults and the reasons? How can we divide and therefore choose which side to be on? It is a perennial ethical question, of course, but which had its tragic topicality in the last century, after the end of the Second World War, when the winning powers found themselves “denied” Germany (and yes, he also tested with the worrying reality of dangerous “awakening” and oblivion of our present …). What’s closer to the absolute evil of Nazism? Yet it can be difficult to establish, among those who explicitly Nazi was not – not even by enrolling in the party -, what was still guilty, finding themselves flanking or indulging the regime with the inaction. With his reasons, human and very human: from the pure cowardice and fear of not surviving a “different” idea of what can be a “resistance”.
On these themes the intense show “Torto or reason”, production of Vittorio Emanuele together with the theater of Rome and the Stabile of Catania, with the direction of Giovanni Anfuso is played – Catania, artistic director of the prose at Vittorio and director of long experience and ductility – was successfully staged in Messina until Sunday, after the happy Roman and Catania stages.
And here we have to write down first The importance of a Messina production in national circuits: the turning point of a theater not only guest, but active client, producer and speaker of synergies and quality.
The staging since the title plays the sharp dichotomy that is the basis of the text (in the translation of Alessandra Serra), the work of Ronald Harwood (Oscar for the script of “The pianist” in 2003) who had already become a film (“Taking Sides” of 2001 with Harvey Keitel). A daring show, with a time unit of time and action and a static nature that makes the outbreak of the basic ethical dilemma sceneof the clash between the opposite reasons, of the American “inquisitor” in charge of instructing the practices on the “Nazi suspects” and a very important artist of Germany of the 1900s, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler (1886-1954), the favorite of Hitler.
The direction focuses everything on this progressive claustrophobia of the scenewhich is an office but overflowing with packaged and caged works (the scene is by Andrea Taddei, the costumes of Isabella Rizza, the music of Paolo Daniele, the lights of Antonio Rinaldi): the famous “stolen art” by the Nazis in half of Europe and which in that confused post -war phase was partially recovered thanks to the allies. But there is another “stolen art” that it was no longer possible to recover: the Jewish artists, or opponents of the regime, who fled or removed or murdered, the mutted and replaced musicians. It is there that the text floods (and the scene is tightened, in the throat): in the investigation on Furwängler. The best, the most famous.
Stefano Santospago, always of great class, makes it dignified and right and Umbrian, in a decisive contrast with the rowdy and openly vulgar ways of the military who questions him, Simone Toni (very effective, perhaps an eighth above the necessary), which is also, at that moment, the liberator and the right, yet it is difficult to empathize with his sguaiation and his open prejudices.
The other characters contribute to the duel between the two, with varieties of well -composed accents as a whole: the Teonetino David Wills, of which Luigi Nicotra makes the renient shyness, however capable of dissolving in passionate peroration in defense of the master, in the name of art; The secretary Emmi Straube, daughter of a war hero, whom Roberta Catanese makes sensitive and sighing and lover of music, and of which we will learn the secret (further confusing reasons and wrongs …); The second violin of the orchestra, Helmut Rode, the excellent Giampiero cicciò who skilled his servile and hypocritical zeal with skill and then the collapse, the admission of the sin of cowardice, a true medium German man who ended up accepting the unacceptable, indeed drawing advantages, but with the aggravating circumstance of being an artist; The energetic Tamara Sachs of Liliana Randi, witness to Discolpa who will not be able to devise, while citing the cases of numerous Jewish artists saved by Furtwängler.
But can those few saved compensate for too many submerged? Can they justify the master’s condescension, even on the occasion of the concert for the birthday of the Führer?
For Furtwängler art “can create a more powerful protest against Auschwitz”, and As long as the music exists, the noise of a broken wand will be irrelevant. But the Yankee, who unlike the teacher saw Auschwitz and his living dead, asks him: “Where is your disgust?”. The necessary disgust in front of the horror. Both express a truth.
So who wins this duel, this continuation of the war with other means in the closed and asphyxiated chamber of the scene (or of consciousness)? Nobody, it seems: the contenders are, in the end, both crushed, both otherwise prostrated. The direction indicates a possible exit that does not make up the conflict, leaving the judgment to us spectators, on the absolute notes of Beethoven. Can beauty be the answer?