Brecht in “Teatroscope”. Santa Giovanna dei Macelli secondo Strehler

Abstract

In Giorgio Strehler’s brechtian itinerary, Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses is one of the most controversial production and even less known. Brecht wrote the play in 1929 to expose the evil and contradictory gears of the Great Depression, but he never saw the play on stage. Strehler represents it in 1970 for Maggio Musicale Fiorentino’s celebrations. There aren’t audio-visual recordings of the event: only notes directing, the script, stills and reviews. On the basis of this documentation, the essay tries to advance hypothesis of reconstruction of the show, highlighting the nature of psychedelic collage of different styles and varied forms of entertainment (cinema, music hall, cabaret, photography, drawing). The gigantism of the staging, the disruptive vocation to intermediality and multidimensionality has suggested the definition of “teatroscope”. It is an hybrid of great originality in the panorama of Italian director’s theater of the late twentieth century, a container literary and figurative that we tried to open up.