A tale of two cities: Gorizia, Nova Gorica and cultural collaboration across borders
On Italy's Mittelfest and an ambitious Italian-Slovenian theatre trilogy.
Hello! Recently I was invited to Italy, to Gorizia in the northern Friuli Venezia Giulia region, where in addition to sampling a lot of insanely nice wine, I got a glimpse of an ambitious theatre project being created to mark the cities of Gorizia and neighbouring Nova Gorica being named the first cross-border European Capital of Culture, more of which below.
This week The Stage published my big interview with Adrian Dunbar, the actor who made a big splash with Hear My Song in the 90s and was a regular presence on UK screens until his role in Line of Duty sent his career skywards. We talked about his long-standing love of Samuel Beckett and his upcoming musical theatre debut in Bartlett Sher’s production of Kiss Me, Kate; he also said some resonant things about navigating the acting industry as someone from a working-class background.
I also wrote a short piece in The Stage about surtitle apps. What’s it like to use them and should more venues consider adopting them?
Oh, and in case you missed it, there was a bonus weekend edition of Café Europa on Carolina Bianchi’s controversial The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella.
______________________________________________________________________
Thank you to all my new paid supporters! If you find this newsletter interesting or valuable, please consider sharing it or, if you or your organisation are able, becoming a paid supporter. Or just enjoy the ride.
To cross from Gorizia in Italy to Nova Gorica in Slovenian you can simply stroll across the border that divides them. Most of the time no one even checks your passport. A dividing line runs through nearby Transalpina Square, in front of the rather grand railway station building, where tourists like to photograph themselves with one foot in one country and one in the other, though you can’t actually do that at the moment as it’s currently a building site while the square is being renovated ahead of next year’s European Capital of Culture festivities.
In 2025, Gorizia and Nova Gorica will become the first cross-border European Capital of Culture, or as the project is being branded, Go!25, the first ‘borderless capital of European culture’. The use of the word ‘borderless’ is, I think, worth unpacking.
Borders are central to the history of the region. Before the First World War, Gorizia was part of the Austrian Hungarian Empire. Then the borders of the Italian town were redrawn after the Second World War, with a portion of the northern part of the city becoming part of what was then Yugoslavia, and now Slovenia. This new bit was called Nova Gorica (literally New Gorizia). Whereas Gorizia looks like a typical northern Italian town with piazzas and churches, much of Nova Gorica was constructed after the war. It was an ideological project as much as an urban development, a triumphal socialist statement, its building overseen by Marshall Josip Broz Tito. (On the hills above the city, a monument spelling out Tito’s name in stones remains). Here’s a good photo essay on Nova Gorica’s construction. This piece is also fascinating on the city’s architecture and history. Our taxi driver, somewhat disapprovingly, called it a “political city,” a phrase, I’ll think you’ll agree, contains a multitude of meanings.
Fences separated the two parts for years, even though the border became a little more porous during the 1960s. Unlike most people on the other side of the Iron Curtain, Yugoslavs could travel to the West. This went both ways. People from Italy could cross the border into Yugoslavia and those from Yugoslavia could cross the border into Italy, often to buy jeans and coffee and other things they couldn’t get hold of at home. My mother, who grew up in Yugoslavia, remembers friends of the family making shopping trips to Trieste. Here’s a great piece about the Italian/Yugoslav border and the trade in blue jeans and a more in-depth one about Italian emigrants to Yugoslavia.
In 2004, Slovenia joined the EU and in 2007 it became a part of the Schengen zone. In many ways the border has been all but eradicated - though, as an Italian journalist I met there explained, recently Italy has suspended the Schengen Treaty and re-introduced border controls because of (often media-stoked) fears around migration. This is presumably a factor in the drop-off in migration numbers to the region in the past year. While we were able to stroll across the border, we were advised to take our passports just in case.
While the main European City of Culture events will happen in 2025, things are already underway. One of the big theatre projects is called Inabili alla Morte (Unable to Die), a trilogy of productions that will be performed in both countries. The trilogy has been conceived by Giacomo Pedini, the artistic director of Mittelfest, the region’s main arts festivals, which as the name suggests was intended as a kind of bridge between Italy and Central Europe.
The opening production in the trilogy, La Cripta dei Cappuccini (The Emperor’s Tomb), is an adaptation of the 1938 novel by Joseph Roth, whose work explored the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was the show we saw during our stay in Gorizia. There are plans to follow it with two newly commissioned texts, the first Cercando la lingua perduta (In search of the lost language), by the Slovenian writer Goran Vojnović (the author of Yugoslavia, My Fatherland, a cracking novel about a young man who discovers his dad was a war criminal) will track Roth’s characters into the 1960s and will be staged by the National Theatre in Nova Gorica later this year. The third chapter, L’alba dopo la fine della storia (Dawn after the end of history), by the Italian writer Paolo Di Paolo will take the story into the 1990s. It will open in September next year, back in Gorizia.
Pedini, who also directs the first and last shows in the trilogy, was drawn to Roth’s novel because of the elegiac way it documents the story of the history of the region. Roth’s protagonist Trotta finds himself catapulted from the coffee houses of Vienna to fight in the First World War. When he finally returns home, it has changed beyond recognition.
When people think about the history of the region, Pedini tells me, they tend to focus on the last 70 years, on the communist period and what came after. “The perception of what it was before is not so clear,” he says, but the ways in which the countries histories are intertwined are fundamental to the region’s identity. Roth’s book ends with the death of empire but also with the birth of nations, he explains, and the divisions that would shape the second half of the century.
He wanted to create a long-form project that would encompass this long view, a trilogy spanning the 20th century. All the main creatives were born, like him in the 1980s, but lived the bulk of their adult lives in the 21st century. “We are dual generational,” he says. “Because the world changed so fast. We live in this kind of world, but we were born and raised in another.”
While each part of the trilogy will be quite different in tone and style, he says, they will all be the product of collaboration and sharing ideas. The cross-border approach is reflected in the casting. Often in Italy, explains Pedini, actors from Slavic countries play gangsters and bad guys, so he cast Slovenian actor Primož Ekart as the character of the Polish Jewish Count forced to flee from the Nazis in The Emperor’s Tomb.
While cultural collaboration between Italy and neighbouring countries does happen, as Pedini points out, the Italian production system is totally different from that of Slovenia and countries like Germany. Most Italian theatres don’t have resident ensembles and aren’t as well-resourced, which can make it “a problem to cooperate with other European countries.”
Mittelfest - meeting in the middle
Mittelfest takes place in the nearby town of Cividale del Friuli, a UNESCO site that’s even more stunning than Gorizia. I mean seriously, will you look at this place.
Every year, in July, it programmes a mixed bill of work from Italy and Central Europe. This year’s programme, for example, includes Negotiating Peace by the Kosovan playwright Jeton Neziraj (which I wrote about here) and Paradiž, a wordless show by the Italian director Matteo Spiazzi for the Slovenian National Theatre in Celje.
Mittelfest was founded in 1991 by the Italian Foreign Ministry to nurture relations between Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria and Yugoslavia, though its founding coincided with Slovenia’s independence and the beginning of the dissolution of Yugoslavia. In its first couple of years it was led by five artistic directors, one from each country. Though this leadership model has changed, its connection with the Balkans remains strong. Pedini has been artistic director since 2020, but before that the role was held by renowned Bosnian director Haris Pašović. Now, says Pedini, the festival has relationships with over 20 countries including Kosovo, Albania, Estonia and Ukraine. It also supports young artists from the region with an open-call for the under-30s.
The Emperor’s Tomb - The carousel of time
And what of the theatre? The Emperor’s Tomb continues the story of the Trotta family from Roth’s better-known novel The Radetzky March, spanning a period from 1913 to 1938. Trotta, played by Italian actor and comedian Natalino Balasso, narrates the story, an older man looking back on his life. Events play out on Alice Vanini’s ingenious revolving set that is half-way between a carousel and bandstand with various panels that allow it to transform into coffeehouses and bars and the home that Trotta shares with his aging mother.
While I’ve not read Roth’s book, this struck me as a faithful production, in the sense that it seemed reluctant to cut much, if any, of the source material. Pedini’s near four-hour-long production sets itself the daunting task of depicting a quarter century of turbulent history, the dawn of Modernism, the heady whirl of the 1920s and the rise of National Socialism. This is presented as a tapestry of major geopolitical shifts and small daily struggles. We get a lesbian subplot, numerous philosophical digressions, and a lot – and I mean a lot - of furniture being shifted on and off stage - including a piano - in order to convey the novel’s many shifts in location and time.
A review of Roth’s book in the Observer described it “as an elegy for a prelapsarian way of life that Trotta didn't much like in the first place” and that feels true of the production. It’s the visuals that makes the strongest impact, the flamboyant costumes - there are some gorgeous outfits, including Trotta’s natty teal waistcoat - and the set itself. By the end, the carousel is eerily backlit in such a way that looks like a shadow of itself, a tattered frame.
While I found the production a bit of a slog at times, I was mindful of the fact that this is the first piece in a trilogy that will traverse the 20th century and that its stately pace will likely make more sense when juxtaposed with the other two pieces in the trilogy, as we move forwards in time and hit the 1960s.
What the show did successfully is speak to the region’s identity as a borderland, to a zone of overlapping cultural influences and shared history.
This week in European theatre
A round-up of festivals, premieres and other upcoming events over the next seven days.
Beckett: Unbound 2024 – The second iteration of the cross-arts Beckett festival co-curated by actor Adrian Dunbar and musician Nick Rhodes features a mix of theatre, dance and music and takes place in venues in Liverpool and Paris between 30th May and 7th June.
Athens Epidaurus Festival – The Greek mega-festival takes place between 1st June and 24th August in venues in Athens and the ancient theatre in Epidaurus. The programme will feature work by Krzysztof Warlikowski, Susanne Kennedy, Tiago Rodrigues as well as the ‘Grape’ showcase of Greek work, including the latest show from Mario Banushi.
Maribor Theatre Festival – Festival Borštnikovo srečanje, as it’s known in Slovenian, showcases the best of Slovenian theatre from the past year. This year’s programme includes two different versions of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America – this one and another production by Ivica Buljan. It runs from 3rd to 16th June in the beautiful city of Maribor and I’ll be there.
Thank you for reading! You can contact me about anything newsletter-related on natasha.tripney@gmail.com
You are such a fine writer! You set me right in the middle of the cross-cultural hubbub. Yet again, wish I could be there! You write so precisely about the productions; I can see that piano moving on and off stage and even feel the slog you're feeling, yet with the excitment that there's more coming down the road. Thanks!