Bros review: Divisive depiction of totalitarian torture

Bros

O’Reilly Theatre

★★☆☆☆

As we file into the auditorium for Romeo Castellucci’s Bros, cameras that look like cannons swivel their gaze across the slowly filling seats while the drone of a siren gets steadily louder. By the time the show begins, with an untranslated monologue performed by an old man in white clerical robes, you can feel the clamour in your bones, vibrating from the speakers to the floor of the stalls. The sonic overload is a deliberate strategy to affront the audience with the psychological and physical violence of life in a surveillance state.

The word fascism is never used, but, given the context of Italian history and its current political reality, it is hard not to see a direct echo of a resurgent European right-wing in Castellucci’s disturbing and demanding drama.

The theatrical allegory is performed by Valer Dellakeza, Luca Nava, Sergio Scarletella and an army of “men from the street”, who are dressed in the formal black uniforms of an unnamed police force. Over 85 minutes they enact various atrocities, including two extended scenes of torture. Religious imagery and staged violence abound. The choreography of group mentality and action is impressive.

Castellucci’s astonishing sound design and Scott Gibbons’s music provide occasional moments of aesthetic beauty to counterpoint the brutality, but shock and degradation form both the mood and the mode of theatricality here. A picture of Samuel Beckett appears at one point, against the strains of Renée Fleming singing Schubert’s lieder Nacht und Träume, the inspiration for Beckett’s 1983 television play, which evokes the cyclical nature of abuse with chilling allusive effect. It is an odd reference point for a work and a director whose work could never be defined as subtle.

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It is difficult to provide a star rating for Bros, as your response will entirely depend on your tolerance for theatricalised trauma. One person might give it five stars and an ovation while their affronted neighbour might decide to leave halfway through. Indeed, perhaps the most authentic moment of this sensationalist drama occurs when police file into the auditorium and line the aisles, as if to block any more dissenters from leaving.

Ran at the O’Reilly Theatre, Belvedere College, Dublin 1, on October 14th and 15th as part of Dublin Theatre Festival