Igor Horvat signs the translation and direction of The Physicists, a grotesque tragicomedy in two acts that Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote between 1959 and 1961, in reaction to the development and use of the atomic bomb during World War II. The work, characterised by a style that mixes detective and spy story, offers a reflection on the future of the human being.
In a setting where reality is never as it appears, the story takes place in a private psychiatric institution, the “Les Cerisiers” clinic. One of the patients is the physicist Möbius, reputed to be the discoverer of the System of All Possible Discoveries, an immense instrument of knowledge that unleashes infinite possibilities, terrible responsibilities and, above all, incontestable power. Curiously, two other patients are also physicists, one claiming to be Isaac Newton and the other Albert Einstein. A disturbing series of murders shatters the balance within the clinic and the inevitable police intervention triggers a succession of unexpected twists and turns. Dangerous secrets come to the surface and raise thorny ethical questions, dragging the story to the apex of paradox, which for Dürrenmatt was an essential key to interpreting reality.
Thanks to its constant ability to question us, The Physicists is counted among the Classics, as it dramatically reveals that humanity has not yet achieved real change and is always confronted with the same fundamental questions. With his unmistakable caustic and committed sarcasm, Dürrenmatt offers us a warning: human beings are called upon to take responsibility for their own future and how they wish to continue to exist on the planet that hosts us.
by
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
translation and direction
Igor Horvat
with (in alphabetical order)
Catherine Bertoni de Laet
Pierluigi Coral
Igor Horvat
Jonathan Lazzini
Marco Mavaracchio
Giorgia Senesi
scenes and drawings
Guido Buganza
costumes
Ilaria Ariemme
lights
Marzio Picchetti
sound
Zeno Gabaglio
assistant director
Ugo Fiore
assistant costume designer
Beatrice Farina
stage manager and chief stagehand
Ruben Leporoni
chief electrician and light giver
Marco Grisa
sound engineer
Nicola Sannino
production and stage seamstress
Lucia Menegazzo
scenes realised by
Studio Cromo
production
LAC Lugano Art and Culture
in co-production with
Teatro Sociale Bellinzona - Bellinzona Teatro
in collaboration with
Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel
stage rights by
Diogenes Verlag AG Zürich
in video
Simon Sisti-Ajmone
Erika Urban
animation from
The Death of Pythia by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
drawings
Guido Buganza
sound
Zeno Gabaglio
conception, translation, editing, production and direction
Igor Horvat
consulting
Madeleine Betschart
Duc-Hanh Luong
Julia Röthinger
Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel
winning project
SRG SSR call for proposals De la scène à l'écran
credits audiovisual transposition
production
Association REC
in co-production with
LAC Lugano Art and Culture
RSI Swiss Radio and Television
direction
Agnese Làposi
photography
Antonino Mangiaracina
sound
Pietro Pasotti
producers
Stefano Mosimann, REC
Nicola Mottis, RSI
The following paintings by Friedrich Dürrenmatt appear in the video within the show:
Labyrinth III¸1974
Der Betende¸1988
Atlas II: Atlas, das Weltgebäude tragend¸1975
Letzter Angriff, 1987
Prometheus, 1988
Mazdak, 1978
Himmelfahrt¸ 1983
Die Physiker II (Weltraumpsalm), 1973
Die Welt der Atlasse, 1965-1978
Unheilvoller Meteor, 1980
Portrait eines Planeten II, 1970
Beim Bau eines Riesen, 1952
All works cited belong to the Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel Collection
© CDN / Swiss Confederation
During the Second World War, mankind created an instrument capable of causing its own extinction: the weapon of mass destruction. Some ten years after writing The Physicists, a visit by Dürrenmatt to CERN in Geneva, whose size and power struck him, testifies to how deep the author's need to question the implications of scientific and technological progress continued to be. Since then, evolution in these areas has had an unstoppable and increasingly accelerated pace. Scenarios that until a few decades ago belonged to science fiction are now concrete.
But the great questions that arise from them, in terms of possible consequences, the assumption of responsibility and the balance of power, still remain dramatically open and burning. The geopolitical chessboard is once again being drawn under the threat of nuclear weapons, making it clear that the Cold War never really ended. Technological progress opens up hypothetical trans-human or post-human scenarios that ignite the debate on the approaching technological singularity. We are daily confronted with an increasingly sophisticated manipulation of reality.
The dramaturgical structure of The Physicists orbits around these issues and their profound ethical implications, leading us along a necessarily non-linear path to the confrontation with theunresolved, or better still, theunsolvable (by the human being). Dürrenmatt reminds us that it is inevitable (and necessary) to confront the complexity of our experience of this world (what, for linguistic convenience, we call life, or existence). A reality that initially presents itself as concrete and apparently legible, instead reveals itself to be multifaceted and brazenly multiform. But above all, it is concealed, impregnable and still full of the mysterious and unknown. With a shrewd analogy between the policeinvestigation and the scientificenquiry , the text moves from the dictates of the literary genre of detective stories to philosophical reflection, it crosses unveiling and lying (and lying means inventing with the mind), it reveals the very thin thread that separates (or unites) comedy and tragedy, the plausible and the grotesque. Hence, the work of constructing the performance sought to consider the different scenic elements (the actor's performance, the set design, the costumes, the lighting and the sound design) as individual levels of meaning. It is their superimposition that determines the reality we perceive.
But, however refined, our five senses only relate us to the tangible aspect of reality, in a deterministic approach that has long guided the progress of our knowledge. It is no coincidence that one of the characters bears the name Newton. However, the form in which reality appears to us is only a thin veil, beneath which new infinities open up (both in the micro and the macro) into which we delve deeper and deeper in order to satiate our mind's innate need to know. In this way, mankind has certainly had the ability to move the limit of the known further and further, through discoveries that have revolutionised the very concept of reality. It is also no coincidence that another figure bears the name of Einstein, who paved the way towards the quantum key thanks to which we now have new interpretative and technological tools.
We know what surrounds us more and more and better, but we continue to run the risk of losing the awareness of our limits, which is necessary to know how to relate to everything that will always remain beyond those limits. Beyond us.
In the face of what lies beyond, we remain undeniably small.
In his 21 points on “The Physicists”, Dürrenmatt refers to chance as one of the variable forces involved in determining events. It is also through chance that we arrive at the definition of what has been (History), as opposed to the mare magnum of possibilities of what could have been. In the short story The Death of Pythia, Dürrenmatt rewrites the Oedipus myth in a sarcastic key, emphasising randomness and lies. This gave rise to the temptation to put Dürrenmatt in dialogue with himself through a dramaturgical insertion of an extract from this short story within The Physicists, in audiovisual form. We have pushed this Dürrenmattian short-circuit beyond the mere thematic reference, also embracing the playing field of the formal aspect. Guido Buganza's original drawings are in turn placed in dialogue with the images of some of Dürrenmatt's paintings, as he himself said that his vast and varied production of paintings and drawings (jealously guarded in a strictly private sphere while he was alive) was in fact the ‘literary battlefield’ in which ideas manifested themselves to him before finding form in words.
LAC, Lugano
05.11.2024
Teatro Sociale Bellinzona
14/15.11.2024
Stage photos
