Bros: Castellucci’s loudly incoherent experiment about the police
The Italian pioneer’s new play recruits a local cast wherever it goes.
O’Reilly Theatre, Dublin Theatre Festival
★★☆☆☆
The obvious thing that can be said about Bros, Romeo Castellucci’s otherwise loudly incoherent play, is its preoccupation with the dark side of policing. Populated by shadowy officers who get marshalled between scenes of brutality and worship, the play makes links between law enforcement and authoritarian rule, dragging us into an accelerating, pummelling spectacle. It is nerve-wrecking, let’s give it that.
Untypical of Castellucci’s plays, much of the intrigue here lies in the casting. Wherever it tours, Bros recruits a large group of local male volunteers – the “men from the street,” according to the programme notes – who are put into law enforcer uniforms and fed instructions via earpiece. By testing ordinary individuals’ compliance with extreme events, the play seems to present the police force as one of society’s bold, unpredictable experiments.
That might have contained the tension of watching a social experiment – the carrying out of unquestioned orders in real time. Instead, the idea has become clouded and obscured by the tools of Castellucci’s iconoclastic theatre, recombining religious imagery into a modern-day parable that rattles spectators with epic displays of design. On arrival, we are handed scripture from the Book of Jeremiah – a clue, perhaps, to an ancient prophet at the play’s beginning (in the striking appearance of Valer Dellakeza), whose forecast, spoken in Romanian, seems desperate for eager listeners.