Bertolt Brecht: Saint Joan of the Stockyards

Economy, capital, financial speculation, exploitation of workers – these are the major themes at the heart of Saint Joan of the Stockyards by Bertolt Brecht. The play was written after the great collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in 1929, which brought about, first in the United States and then in Europe, ten years of economic crisis, industrial failures, land abandonment, unemployment, poverty, continuing right up to the Second World War. Today we are in permacrisis, the centres of production have shifted, the great working masses no longer live in the privileged West and the owners are more difficult to identify, but the exploitation of living beings and resources has not stopped; on the contrary, it has generated other changes, such as global warming, wars, pandemics, energetic crises – consequences of the same diseased economic system. All of this continues to make Saint Joan of the Stockyards a contemporary text that addresses issues close to us and offers us the opportunity to connect them in a dialectical relation to our present through the use of reality videos. And if the billionaires reread Marx to save capitalism from itself, we reread Saint Joan of the Stockyards to free ourselves from it, bringing it to the scene with a staging in which Brecht’s words are entrusted to actors of different languages, precisely because in the age of globalisation, only by joining forces we can achieve the revolution that will ensure that future generations continue living on this planet. The music for the project is composed and performed on stage by the cult band Laibach.

Performance in Italian, Slovenian, German, English with surtitles.

With the support of the Italian Cultural Institute in Slovenia.