Arts Festival Review: T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T.

T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T.
A TR Warszawa Production
13, 14, 16-19 March, 8pm
TSB Bank Arena

The 1960s were a highwater mark for the kind of glacially-paced and existentially introspective cinema that hardly anyone makes – or watches – any more, and no one made those movies quite like the Italians: think of directors such as Visconti, Antonioni, Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Polish theatre director Grzegorz Jarzyna has adapted Pasolini's 1968 film Theorem as T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T., which makes an odd sort of counterpoint to the earlier festival show Sound of Silence. The two Eastern European theatre companies present very different takes on sex and the social changes of the 1960s.

In both productions, sex is a subversive act, but in Silence it was the dourly authoritarian surveillance state machinery of the USSR that was subverted. T.E.O.R.E.M.A.T. makes almost the reverse case, documenting the disintegration of the members of a wealthy Italian family after a visitor comes to stay and seduces each of them in turn, exposing them to the possibility of personal self-fulfilment and a life outside the conventions and compulsions of the family, the law and the capitalist economy.

If anything locates the production most specifically in the 1960s, other than the immaculately modernist set design and costumes, it's the idea that sex could pose a threat to the consumer society and advanced capitalism. You only have to look to Italy in 2010, where president Silvio Berlusconi's party is accused of