JUSTIN BUTCHER – “Dario Fo remains my greatest theatrical influence”

Justin Butcher is a writer, director, producer, actor and musician with an extensive international experience. Recently, he has been involved in several theatre projects in Italy, working in collaboration with J. Productions. We have met him to find out more about them.

2019 Dublin Theatre Festival

Justin, what led you to participate in the J. Productions projects in Italy?

Julia Holden asked me to collaborate with her on a dramatisation of her uncle’s memoirs of his childhood in pre-war Berlin. Her mother and her uncle were the children of a German-Jewish father and gentile mother and the family had to flee from Berlin to England in 1938, to escape the Nazi persecution. Max Neimann’s memoir, Childhood in Berlin paints a touching, very human, and often funny portrait of a harmonious multi-cultural neighbourhood in the Tempelhof suburb of Berlin: a kind of love letter to that lost, last flowering of German-Jewish culture. In many ways, you could describe it as the pinnacle of Jewish culture in Europe - before the Nazis came to power and everything changed forever. Well, we worked on the story together and created (I believe) a powerful, touching, and entertaining play that has yet to find its way to the stage - but I’m confident it will! Over these past ten years, Julia and I have collaborated on producing many shows, concerts, workshops, lectures, and events - in London and Milan, and also in Tuscany. Last year, for example, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Julia had the brilliant idea to recreate Boccaccio’s storytelling retreat, as described in The Decameron, in a villa in Tuscany. Ten storytellers, fleeing the great plague of 1348, escape from Florence to a countryside villa and entertain themselves by telling stories for ten days. Nearly 700 years later we did the same - and it was a truly inspiring and memorable experience for all the participants. Later this year, we’re producing a 24-hour marathon live reading of the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy - in English, at a venue in Florence (precise location to be confirmed) - to mark the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death (14th September 1321), and to raise funds for charities working with refugees. Dante was exiled cruelly and unjustly from Florence at the height of his career and lamented his lost homeland for the rest of his life.

Over the first few months of this year, again thanks to Julia’s creative vision, we’ve been curating and hosting a series of online play-readings on the theme of Changing Times, and fortnightly Speaking Dante events, convening a live audience via zoom to read and study various cantos of Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. They’ve been extremely popular! People love the direct engagement of a live event, even if it’s on zoom - the feeling that you’re there in the present moment with the performers, that the performance is being created at the moment. We’ve just launched our second season of online play-readings, Avenging Angels, which will include Dario Fo’s fabulous Accidental Death of an Anarchist on 2nd June.

In your opinion, what aspects the English and Italian theatre have in common, and what are the major differences?

English and Italian theatre have common ancestry – from the theatre of the ancient Greeks, and also the Roman dramatists – and of course they have many characteristics which are entirely distinct. By the time the Roman legions departed from Britain, after an occupation of nearly 400 years, British and Roman culture were completely interwoven. Which is what made the withdrawal of Roman governance, infrastructure and security so traumatic. Then, into the British culture of the ‘Dark Ages’ (they were never really that dark) comes a huge swathe of Germanic and Scandinavian influence – the Viking sagas, Beowulf, etc – which isn’t there in Italian literary DNA (as far as I’m aware). Then the legend of King Arthur arises in early medieval British culture and takes form in various French romances and thus finds its way to Italy. Meanwhile, Carolingian and medieval Italian cultures have all sorts of fascinating influences coming from the Arabic world and the Far East, through its seagoing powers, such as Venice, Pisa, etc. 

It’s interesting that the Mystery Plays are there in both medieval England and Italy – rough, peasant street theatre appropriating and reinterpreting biblical stories – often in a very vulgar and subversive fashion. Dario Fo draws on this tradition quite brilliantly in Mistero Buffo. And then, of course, the wandering clowns, jongleurs or giullari of medieval Lombardy, Sicily, etc, evolve into the commedia dell’arte – which then spreads to France and thence to England. Shakespeare certainly saw travelling commedia companies perform in London – and you can notice their direct influence in some of his early plays, such as Two Gentlemen of Verona. The indissoluble connection just strengthens from that point onwards; no fewer than thirteen of Shakespeare’s plays are set in Italy, including some of the greatest – Romeo & Juliet, Merchant of Venice, Othello, Coriolanus, etc – and he draws many of his stories from Italian sources, such as Boccaccio. Commedia is reborn in the ‘peculiarly English’ art of pantomime (Roman Comedy + commedia + a bit of Restoration Comedy = pantomime), which is performed in every theatre up and down the UK at Christmas time (in ‘normal times’). And Dario Fo of course is a glorious manifestation of these ancient traditions in the modern era – who remains the single greatest theatrical influence on my work.

Can you please tell us about Hippolytus Unplugged? How did this idea develop and why do you think this work will be appreciated by the Italian public?

Hippolytus Unplugged is different from Madness and the other satires I mentioned but has some of the same flippant, irreverent energy as my overtly satirical stuff. I wrote it originally as a two-hander for the St James Cavalier Arts Centre in Malta, back in 2001, and then we did it at the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe, where it was a big hit. A one-act, comic update of the ancient Greek legend of Hippolytus and Phaedra, about the destructive power of erotic obsession. A young, beautiful, vain, cruel athlete, Paul (Hippolytus), worships physical fitness and lives a life of rigid ascetic purity. He reviles women and everything to do with sex. So, Aphrodite must have her revenge – by making his new stepmother, Fi (Phaedra) fall fatally, disastrously in love with him. It’s funny, physical, stylish, sexy, disturbing, even shocking, and, I hope, it illuminates – or at least explores – the crazy absurdities and extremes to which the enchanting power of Aphrodite can drive us. Despite our purported liberalism these days, I think we’re still very uptight about sex. Superficially, you could look at western European societies and conclude that our culture is obsessed with sex – look at the magazines, billboard posters, films, etc – but I think we are actually terribly un-free in many ways.

I don’t think I’ve solved anything in Hippolytus Unplugged, but I hope it will entertain, shock, and provoke a bit. And maybe invite us to have a little more reverence for the power of enchantment.

Images courtesy of Justin Butcher