On the Difficulty of Telling the Truth

The play is based on a literary-political essay written by Bertolt Brecht titled Writing the truth: five difficulties. Written in 1934, after Hitler’s rise to power, for the exiled German playwright this was like a manual of military strategy through which he could set fort rules on how to speak the truth to the disempowered and fight the lies of those who held the power. ErosAntEros decides to present this text together with some poems by the same author in a performance concentrated on sound and voice, with the vocal presence of Agata Tomsić and the live electronic music by Davide Sacco, and with the projection of real-life images by the photographer Michele Lapini, a keen observer of the social, environmental and political issues that characterize today’s world.

    The work that ErosAntEros is trying to accomplish can be explained through Walter Benjamin citation technique. It was a way of extracting a fragment of the past full of “now” – which provided an answer to the political situation of today – and then inserting it into the present, in a similar way as the company is now trying to operate, putting the text in relation to the images of our present. Lapini’s pictures are inherently dialectical: they unfold on multiple planes, they associate they associate different meanings within the same framing that, when assembled, lead to a new interpretation of the reality of which they are a trace.

    The artistic act becomes a political action. A battle to make this essay known, relating it to perspectives capable of making people see reality in a different light, following Brecht’s idea that a book is a weapon, and Benjamin’s theory that art should hit the spectator like a bullet.

    “Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it, although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgement to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons. These are formidable problems for writers living under Fascism, but they exist also for those writers who have fled or been exiled; they exist even for writers working in countries where civil liberty prevails.”

Bertolt Breht, Prologue to Writing the truth: five difficulties