Exils

"Here’s a young theatre director trying to find a way to come up with theatre for this day and age... Never heard of him? Then you really might want to check this guy out".

- UTOPIA PARWAY

Voted 'Man of the Year' by one of Belgium's best-known lifestyle magazine supplements at just 28, the youthful theatre director Fabrice Murgia has a double billing at this year's festival. As well as Ghost Road with the Flemish company LOD, he also presents Exils, a Théâtre National Bruxelles production which forms part of an ambitious project called Cities on Stage, supported by the Cultural Programme of the European Union and which includes Madrid's Teatro de La Abadía.

Described as a reflection on contemporary social policy, Exils is a work based on imagination and documentary techniques placing itself somewhere between objective and virtual reality with its own language of today. What Murgia is doing, with his wizardry and theatrical effects, is appealing to a generation used to watching movies, going to rock concerts, playing computer games and spending their lives on Facebook and Twitter.

Murgia constructs strong theatrical images using lights, soundscapes and ephemeral effects which create the impression of being in the middle of an authentic cinematographic editing process, with scene changes every time the stage curtain closes and re-opens, like the showing of one film clip after the other.

The paths of three young Europeans and an illegal immigrant converge onstage. Their meeting reveals dreams, a longing for escape, shared disappointments and conflicting opinions which dissolve into a big cloud of white smoke which, as if by magic, floods the stage over their heads. Murgia is, in reality, asking: "How can a young person rebel when injustice and expedience thrive?"

 

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