ARE WE FASCISTS? Rau stages Pasolini

 

THE LAST GENERATION
RAU STAGES PASOLINI

 

The very announcement that Milo Rau would stage an adaptation of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma together with actors with disabilities led to a broad debate in the Belgian media during the last weeks.

 

Skewing between a poetic interpretation and a disturbing appropriation of Pier Pasolini’s film and De Sade’s book, Milo Rau and Theater STAP hold up a mirror to modern society: Are we, apparently more tolerant and sensitive than all previous societies, perhaps the real fascists? Why do we preach diversity while eradicating all that is different?

 

The foundations for his new production were laid in 2017, when Milo Rau worked closely with Swiss theatre HORA to stage the play Die 120 Tage von Sodom. With The Last Generation, Milo Rau reworks this project, focusing on the socio-political context of Belgium.

 

Get tickets for the premiere at Théâtre de Liège on November 5, or the first tour locations in Brussels, Ghent and Turnhout.

 

HARD TO TAKE
RECLAIMING THE FUTURE

 

“You are not interested in theater? Because it’s theater? This is your book. Provided you love life.” This is how the Frankfurter Rundschau judges Milo Rau’s aesthetic autobiography The Reconquest of the Future (Die Rückeroberung der Zukunft), which already became a bestseller in Germany.

 

“Here writes an intellectual who has never lost his tenderness,” judges DIE ZEIT, and is impressed by the “utopias for the 21st century”, while Austria’s Falter reads “an honest, splendid, self-ironic and clever book.”

 

On the other hand, the Süddeutsche Zeitung finds Rau’s “revolutionary pathos” “hard to take”, and Tagesspiegel even suspects the director of playing at being a “prophet”: “For Rau, art is a grip on the mechanics of the world, so that it becomes a different one.”

 

Judge yourself: The Reconquest of the Future is available in all German-language bookstores. Translations into various languages are in preparation.