La Fabbrica Illuminata / Far Away

Forest fires and air pollution, blast furnaces and chimneys are burning up our world. How did it get this far? The composer Luigi Nono and the playwright Caryl Churchill dealt with this inferno of postmodernism in two short but concise plays, which we are presenting in a double bill at Theater Freiburg. LA FABBRICA ILLUMINATA OR PROMETHEUS GOES TARANTO brings the ecological and oncological catastrophe of the port city of Taranto in southern Italy to the stage. It is home to Europe's largest steelworks, "Ilva", which has been contaminating the environment and local residents since it opened in 1965. Like the composer Luigi Nono, whose music theater work LA FABBRICA ILLUMINATA documented his interviews with Italian steelworkers in the 1960s, director Joscha Zmarzlik made his way to Italy and spoke to those affected. He interweaves their anger, grief and dreams with Nono's work and the Prometheus myth. The world that Caryl Churchill sketches in her drama FAR AWAY seems unreal, "far away" and yet familiar: a nightmare in close-up. In three acts, it describes the creeping process of the destruction of a supposedly intact world by an establishing political-totalitarian system. Young Joan grows up in this crumbling world. For her, the horror becomes a habit. In his production of FAR AWAY, young director Dario Fini explores the question of how far away "far away" really is - and how it is possible to maintain something like normality in the face of omnipresent horror...