ROBERTO ZUCCO – REVIEW OF 2024 BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES PRODUCTION

 Reviewed by James Karas

The blurb on the website of Buddies in Bad Time Theatre about Bernard-Marie Koltes’ play Roberto Zucco reads as follows:

Witness the living through the eyes of the dead. Roberto Zucco lures us into the wet streets and gloomy rooms of 1980s Europe, where a charming antihero battles his cosmic urge to kill. Written as he was dying in 1989, Koltès’ sordid swan song is Greek tragedy kissed by Gregg Araki—breathlessly violent but with a pitch-black wit and occasional syrupy sweetness that leaves you disarmed. Caught between the realms of true crime and grotesque fantasy, the play shines a blistering sun on our darkest impulses; by the end, you’ll wonder if we’re just flightless birds in the face of our fates.

Living through the eyes of the dead, cosmic urge to kill, the play shines a blistering sun on our darkest impulses, by the end, you’ll wonder if we’re just flightless birds in the face of our fates?

Regretfully, I experienced none of the above as I tried to follow the plot that seemed to be devoid of all of them. I am still trying to figure out who is living through whose dead eyes, what is a cosmic urge to kill and how does a murderer become an anti-hero, whatever that is. The rest of the blurb makes even less sense but so be it.

The play opens on a dark stage with two actors with a microphone stand in front of them conversing about what they are seeing or should be looking at. They are prison guards and tell us that escaping from their prison is all but impossible. But they notice someone on the roof doing just that. The fugitive murdered his father and after escaping visits his mother and murders her too. By the end of the 100 minutes or so he murders a child and a police officer. He must have a really bad case of the cosmic urge.

Fiona Highet and Jakob Ehman in “Roberto Zucco” 
Photo by Jeremy Mimnagh

We learn his name, Roberto Zucco, and hear his stories or fantasies about himself. We know he is a murderer who looks on the four killings with dispassion. Turning morality and the value of human life, including the lives of your parents, on their head in a play is an attention getter to be sure. Zuccaro can be a charming lover, a secret agent, and a rapist. In one scene he sits on a bench with an elegant lady and demands the keys to her Mercedes. He threatens to shoot her child (and he does) but she is attracted to him and goes along with him. Again, turning morality on its head.

The play has 21 characters acted by seven actors, Jakob Ehman, Samantha Brown, Fiona Highet, Daniel MacIvor, Kwaku Okyere, and Oyin Oladejo. The program does not give us any details about who plays what role in the play’s fifteen scenes. Most of the scenes are short and the dialogues, the philosophizing and the situations are mostly brief and as becomes Koltes’ attitude are removed from the logic we may expect from human beings.

Koltes wrote the play in 1989, moths before he died of an AIDS-related disease. The character of Zuccaro is based on a real serial killer that Koltes molded into his world view.

The  set consisted of a gray wall with a roof at the back that came crashing after Zuccaro escaped. A well-lit table and chairs were the scene for two women talking, a simple bench for the scene with the elegant woman and rooms for other scenes.

ted witzel directed Martin Crimp’s translation of the play. I watched the performance with interest but I cannot say that I enjoyed the fast-moving scene changes and weirdness of the characters and the play. Perhaps a different production may strike the right chord in me.
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Roberto Zucco by Bernard-Marie Koltes played until October 5 2024 at the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre,  12 Alexander Street, Toronto, Ontario. www.buddiesinbadtimes.com

James Karas is the Senior Editor, Culture of The Greek Press