Gareth Southgate had a “genuine desire to unite people around a particular project rather than divide people and cause upset,” said British playwright James Graham in his tribute-cum-eulogy to the departing England football manager after the nation’s defeat to Spain in the final of Euro 24.
Graham, who is busy rewriting his football drama, Dear England, in light of this outcome (presumably as a tragedy), is best known for the sting of his political dramas, which so often expose division, government doublespeak and hypocrisy. His words brought to mind the role of theatre-makers and their responsibility to unite the audience around a “particular project”, or otherwise.
Is a good theatre director akin to a successful football manager? Theatre is, famously, built upon conflict – but does it have a duty to unite its audience, rather than divide, perhaps through its exercise of empathy? These questions become more complicated in the context of cross-border, cross-national European theatre projects whose mission is as much diplomacy – a cultural reaching out, of sorts – as creative endeavour.
This brings us to the raison d’etre of events such as the Theatre Olympics, staged in Budapest last year, or the many pan-European cultural initiatives set up to foster understanding and bring the continent closer together.
And if the sequin-studded showmanship of the Eurovision song contest did not quite fulfil the same mission to unite through music this year, a quieter jamboree staged on the same night was aspiring towards European cross-border entente, but this time through the medium of theatre.
In the Italian city of Gorizia, near Venice, an adaptation of Joseph Roth’s 1938 novel, The Emperor’s Tomb, was performed as part of Mittelfest, an annual festival of culture on the Italian-Slovenian border. It is itself bisected by the border between the two EU nations, turning into Nova Gorica on the Slovenian side. The two parts have jointly been awarded European capital of culture 2025 status, and this production was the first in a trilogy of plays that will be performed on both Italian and Slovenian soil.
Roth’s epic follows its protagonist through the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1850s Vienna, the first world war, and the rise of the Nazi party. Its themes reflect the divided legacy of this region – it too was part of Austria-Hungary until the first world war, and then split into its two parts after the formation of Yugoslavia. One side of the city was barricaded from the other until 1994, that barrier seen as middle Europe’s own Berlin Wall. The region has long served as a bristling meeting point between central Europe and the west.
Mittelfest was founded in 1991 with the express purpose of breaching the region’s mutual suspicions and political divides. Giacomo Pedini, the festival’s artistic director, chose to stage Roth’s story because, he said, it “captures the spirit of our time”. For him, the region’s history has been erased on both sides, and the festival is an act of “remembering”: “It [history] started in 1945 for Slovenia, and Italy suppressed its history too.”
The motivation to unite through culture is admirable, but can it successfully be deployed as a diplomatic tool?
In this instance, the ambition was too muted. The play, directed by Pedini, felt like faithfully rendered but anodyne costume drama, cautious in its political parallels and removed from our time, despite the contemporary rise of the far right, including Italy’s turn in this direction. Its plodding pace didn’t help, stretching to almost four hours. With what remained of the audience, I staggered out of the Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi theatre in Gorizia at 1am – not quite sure how the production spoke to the politics of the moment, just as the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, stands accused of purging her enemies from the arts and cultural sectors.
It felt as if this production was sending me back to another time and place rather than opening my eyes to the contemporary resonances in Roth’s drama, of which there are many. It was not the choice of source material but the overcautious treatment of it that made it such a wasted opportunity. I hope the next two plays in the trilogy, opening in Slovenia in the autumn, and in Italy next year, are more willing to interrogate recent history. It sounds as if they will at least try: one is set in the 1960s behind the iron curtain, the other in the dying days of the Soviet Union with a storyline that involves a journalist looking into a rape case in Yugoslavia. Because it is not, to my mind, oblique parallels through the veil of costume drama that we need at this time – but a robust challenge from the relative safety of fiction and the stage.
This does not necessarily mean we need new plays, addressing a Europe we instantly recognise as our own today, although this would be one way ahead. Historical drama, when done well, can be just as confrontational.
This festival has looked division far more fully in the face in the past. Under the leadership of the firebrand Bosnian theatre director Haris Pašović its programme did not shy away from provocation, even if his objective, he says, was to “build bridges and not walls (ponti, non muri).” He sought to give the festival a radical edge, convened ensembles from both sides of the border, and infused his programme with politics. He also spoke out against local politicians when they talked of raising the Italy-Slovenia wall back up again to halt migration – so much so that he provoked Italian newspaper headlines, including: “Pašović go home!”
Pašović thought he would be fired for his outspokenness, but he kept his job and festival audiences kept coming. What has changed since is real-world politics. Where Pašović’s appointment was made under the Democratic party, the hard-right League party, which is now in coalition with Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, won the local elections soon after. Far more people, in this region and farther afield, now seem suspicious of “building bridges and not walls”, Gianni Barbacetto, veteran journalist at the Rome-based newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, told me.
A changed political climate may inevitably leave its imprint on government-funded cultural programming and define how politically inflammatory a theatre festival can be (Mittelfest is subsidised by the Friuli Venezia Giulia region). Is the purpose to have a frank, and possibly difficult, exchange of ideas, or is it merely a gesture that glazes over the difficult conversations? And to what degree does funding define that – would productions like Pedini’s be braver in grappling with the issues of the day if the money behind them came from a non-governmental source?
Off-stage, suspicion seems to lie under the surface of daily life across this region: lorries crossing the border are searched for fear of illegal immigrants and alleged terrorism, I’m told. Rumours and conspiracy theories abound that secret services are financing Islamic radicalism in Bosnia, and that these forces may leak into Italy. One taxi driver points to the casinos we pass in Nova Gorica and tells me they are all furtively run as brothels.
Barbacetto says the long-held Italian prejudice towards Slovenians is summed up in a common pejorative: sciavi, or slave. He was at Transalpina Square in 1994, the site of the original border wall, when it came down. The square is fenced off and full of rubble now, in mid-refurbishment for Go! 2025 celebrations. Barbacetto remembers the sense of two worlds opening up – the idea of ponti, no muri in action.
Cross-border initiatives in Europe, by their nature, need to be accessible and broad-brush enough to appeal to a bilingual, bicultural audience.
But at a time when Europe is facing dramatic global challenges, including the war in Ukraine, the shadow of Donald Trump back on the horizon, and the far right’s steady rise across the continent, we need art to be more, not less, politically challenging.
Perhaps jamborees like this one need to take a leaf out of Graham’s book of political writing, or indeed, Pašović’s former tenure, which seemed defined by a will to agitate and expose inside the auditorium all that is wrong out there, in the world.
Arifa Akbar is the Guardian’s chief theatre critic
