Chances are not inconceivable that you have never heard of Fortunato Depero have heard. Or maybe you are a lover of classic design and still have an old mini bottle of Campari stand. He made that. As a playwright, you might well have overlooked him. On 21 June, I went to see if you are selling yourself short with that. After just under an hour and a half at 'Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed' in a thankfully well-cooled Compagnie theatre, I can reassure you. Fortunato Depero, who lived from 1892 to 1960, was no Heijermans. Or Bertolt Brecht.
Depero was a supporter of the Futurism, an art movement from the time when, as an artist, you always had to be a member of a group or movement, and then someone would write a manifesto. About which, in turn, at this Holland Festival, a wonderful video installation is made.
Mussolini
Futurism celebrated the advent of new technology. Futurists assumed that technology would make humans into half-gods, who would subjugate the disembodied working-class people. They therefore felt very much at home with Mussolini's Italian fascism in particular. Which also made it a bit of a mistake, of course.
Anyway: long story short. American puppet theatre maker Dan Hurlin unearthed an archive in Depero's native village containing sketches for plays. Impracticable by the standards of the time and therefore never shown. However, with today's digital techniques and clever use of puppets, much of Depero's work can be performed. And that's a shame.
Puppet theatre
Not that I don't like puppet theatre. On the contrary. Puppet theatre can be much more exciting than real-life theatre. In the beginning of the show, Dan Hurlin shows that too. Then you are on the edge of your seat watching a fragile doll of a desperate lady who possesses herself out of grief and then plunges into an abyss.
After that, things go a bit awry. This is partly down to Depero's scripts. It starts with the suicidal woman's lover turning into a mass-murdering monster out of rage (thanks to superior technology). In the following plays, things go from bad to worse. Take the show's title seriously: everything is destroyed with stunning speed. A counter runs along on the backdrop, keeping track of the death toll. The scripts then reach the superficial level of toddler play, in the form of very naive Marvel comics, where the jokes with the puppets are amusing at first, but gradually become more and more predictable and annoying.
Explainer
After which Hurlin throws another American explanatory-educational sauce over it. This makes things unbearable. Anyone who, watching this performance, does not understand that senseless violence leads to even more senseless violence must have been under a very big rock. That there are similarities between Trump and Mussolini is also well enough known by now.
That in America every year toddlers have more firearms deaths on their conscience than terrorists, in turn, is a fact that is not reflected in the explanation phase.
With the images, however funny and imaginatively made, plus the accompanying explanations, Hurlin detracts from the performance more than is good. With simple reading aloud of the found scripts, Depero might have made more of an impression.
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