Roberto Zucco
Bernard-Marie Koltes

Brink Productions
Balcony Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Roberto Zucco is a modern Lizzie Borden. First he gave his father forty whacks. Then he gave his mother forty two. After that, he kills a policeman and a child. Freud may be able to explain the first three but only the Devil can account for the last. Based on the actual exploits of an Italian hoodlum, French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltes’ creation is a grimly funny portrait of the psychopath as a young man. Koltes’ final play, Roberto Zucco is about an affectless killer in an affectless society and often it is hard to tell which is the more beastly- the bourgeois, or their boy.

In this lively translation by Martin Crimp, Koltes’ fractured meditation on the nature of evil is rather like an epic comic book. Two prison guards discuss the source of criminal tendency while Zucco, imprisoned a mere two hours earlier, is making his escape over their heads. When he returns home to get his combat fatigues, almost as an afterthought Zucco strangles his mother as he bids her goodbye. He rapes a schoolgirl so alienated from her own barbarous family that she befriends him. Meanwhile her brother, recognising that she no longer has commodity value in marriage, prepares to sell her to a brothel. Her parents, drunken and dazed, pay no attention, while her neurotic sister, like something out of a mad fairy tale, clings to her as an object of depraved devotion.

In Brink’s production, designer Mary Moore has created a set based on sliding panels each revealing some new glimpse of cruelty and betrayal, abuse of power and trust. The opening scene of the guards, letterboxed in a black panel while Zucco hotfoots across the steel mesh proscenium is striking and weirdly comic. The costumes are deliberately, expressionistically one dimensional. The Melancholy Detective wears a Bogart trenchcoat, the prostitutes are scarlet, Dad is boorish in his beergut singlet, Mother is in curlers and housecoat and Big Sister looks like an escapee from an Edvard Munch painting. The scenes changes are highlighted by acid-coloured side projections from Phillip Lethlean and the performance is enveloped by Jeremy Rowney’s jittery score of bleating saxophone, bass, drum and hurdy gurdy.

Director Tim Maddock has his hands full managing such a strong onslaught of styles and effects. With the sliding doors the scene changes are complex and the jagged narrative needs pace to maintain impact. The performances are often excellent. Richard Kelly has an obsessive, oddly childish energy as Roberto Zucco, running like an open razor through a society as cruel in its complacency as he is in his murderous whim. Michaela Cantwell and John Molloy are memorable as the sister sacrificed to commerce, and the brother who indifferently betrays her. Victoria Hill is out of key as the sister; instead of seething, director Maddock has allowed her to become merely shrill.

In one of the most harrowing scenes, Elizabeth Falkland manages a deft comedy as a bored young matron who with her small boy is hostaged in a park by Zucco. As a chorus of onlookers bicker heartlessly, the woman takes up with the criminal even as he executes the child. The events tangle together with a discomforting lack of moral direction from the writer. Like the anticlimactic arrest of Zucco and his final flight from the roof, the play forces us to compensate for the numbness and lack of resolution within it. Unlike the modish cynicism of Oliver Stone or Tarantino at his more indulgent, Bernard-Marie Koltes has found a way of engaging his audience in a series of Brechtian meditations. And Crimp’s translation and Brink’s production provide the ferocious comedy and emblematic performances to give them vividness and meaning, imprinting them – like unwelcome lesions, or difficult dreams.

The Adelaide Review, May 1999.