Ferai

 

A Greek island or an island in the North Sea. There was once an autocratic king who kept order in the state and family through the fear of ruthless laws. He died. His place was taken by a just young man who loved peace and non-violence, who wanted to free the people from subjection to authority and to the gods, and who wanted to abolish prisons and treat criminals as sick patients to be rehabilitated. As in all fables, the young king wins both power and the daughter of the dead king as his bride.

 

The performance begins where Kaspariana finished: with a struggle for the possession of a knife. The young prince who takes over shows another kind of violence: he surrenders the weapon and fights with his bare hands, a smile upon his lips, not violent like a ferocious dog but with a feline gentleness, harmonious, acrobatic, dancing, and revealing implacability only at the precise moment of the strike. He demonstrates the necessary use of violence to install a reign of non-violence, of force to ensure a reign of reason.

The struggle for power is no different from before. But the fact that it now takes place in the name of absolute principles of which no one has any concrete experience, allows for a certain nostalgia for the ordered tyranny of the deceased autocratic king. And the bride, the king's daughter, caught in the jaws of a double injustice, takes the law into her own hands and commits suicide. In vain, because that was what the young king needed. After mourning her briefly, he tramples on her mortal remains and his people follow him in bewilderment and awe.

 

Created in Holstebro, Denmark.

 

Actors

Ulla Alasjärvi, Marisa Gilberti, Juha Häkkänen, Sören Larsson, Else Marie Laukvik, Iben Nagel Rasmussen, Carita Rindell, Torgeir Wethal

 

Text: Peter Seeberg

Adaptation and directing: Eugenio Barba

Language: The actors speak their own different Scandinavian languages

Number of spectators per performance: 60

 

220 performances from June 1969 to July 1970