Barbican, London
You have to suppress a smile: a show obsessively concerned with bowel movements being presented as part of the experimental Spill festival. But, for all the shock-horror advance warnings about the show's faecal overload, I found myself mildly bored rather than morally outraged by Romeo Castellucci's hour-long production for the Soc�etas Raffaello Sanzio.
The situation is pretty fundamental. In a pristine white Italian pad a son is looking after his serially incontinent father; and, initially, there is something touching about the son's readiness to clear up his father's mess, dispose of his nappies and lovingly cleanse his bottom. But the role-reversal, in which the son becomes a protective parent and the father reverts to second childhood, is obvious and the action grows stale by repetition. By the time the son steered the father towards his spotlessly immaculate bedroom, there were some barely stifled guffaws since the eventual outcome was all too apparent.
But it is in the final quarter-hour that the show becomes really contentious. At the back of the stage is a blown-up image of the face of Jesus from a painting by Antonello da Messina. After the shit-clearing son has gone up and kissed the portrait's lips with a cry of "Jesu, Jesu", the giant, membrane-like canvas starts to shake and billow and eventually get torn apart by shadowy figures apparently wielding knives and blowtorches. As the face dissolves, we see huge letters proclaiming You Are Not My Shepherd. But, finally, the word "Not" disappears and a projected image of Jesus returns, only this time with an excremental stream pouring from his right eye-socket.
You can make of this what you will. I guess Castellucci is saying something about the yearning for faith in a godless age, about the continuation of the process by which sons sacrifice themselves for fathers and about the links between the spirit and the-all-too fallible flesh. But what makes the show seem perverse rather than profound is the sudden leap from mundane medical realism into apocalyptic iconoclasm. It's as if we've gone from behavioural detail to Bu�uel in a trice and I suspect there is something showy and self-advertising about Castellucci's emphasis on Christ's ocular evacuation.
Gianni Plazzi as the sobbing, guiltily ashamed father and Sergio Scarlatella as the lovingly attentive son perform their roles with a devotion beyond the call of duty. And I wouldn't deny there is a good deal of technical skill involved both in the destruction of the canvas and in the simulation of the shit. But, although it was respectfully received, this is a show that changes nothing, and that, through the use of Christ's image, assumes a grandeur it hasn't earned. Pitched half-way between domestic drama and a piece of pseudo-religious performance art, it ends up falling, literally, between two stools.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/apr/22/concept-of-the-face-review
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