Affabulazione

Première: 24 January 2024, SNT Nova Gorica

Running time 2 hours and 45 minutes. One intermission.

Director Jan Krmelj
 

This is a modern tragedy, but in it, the present is already something past. A simple dream interrupts the peaceful and successful life of a Milanese industrialist who is vacationing with his family. His attempt to understand the meaning of an unusual dream leads to an even more destructive obsession with control over his son. When the father asks the son to kill him (some kind of Oedipus in reverse), the son runs away – and finally, the father kills the son. History ends, and passing the world like a torch between generations stops. In the epilogue, twenty years after the murder, the father lives at a train station as a beggar and, reminding us of an original histrion, shares his story with his imaginary listener. But this is not a story of one father, this is a story of the inevitable violence of a human being who wants to have, know and understand everything, at any price – and who cannot accept that other models of meaning exist. The son rejects murders, old and new (he doesn’t even take over his father’s company and continue his story), which shakes the father’s certainty and triggers his desire to destroy. Like capitalism, patriarchal society also can’t accept change, but instead demands destruction. Of everything, just so it can survive: it doesn’t allow an alternative. Pasolini puts human life into words as inevitably mythological.