Roberto Zucco # 2

The NTCK’s resident company (1/2) 

We have been planning our work on Roberto Zucco for over a year. In July 2015, Jean Lambert-wild and Lorenzo Malaguerra travelled to Seoul to identify what was at stake. The project’s challenges are also its rules, and we must follow them if we are to stage such an important play. To afford ourselves some freedom, we must first constrain ourselves to precision: the set design must be precise, so must dramaturgy, the translation, the costumes… But the highest stake was, of course, casting. The NTCK (National Theater Company of Korea) organised a casting call, grouping together independent actresses and actors as well as its permanent members. 

 

Casting actors is always a difficult, if not impossible, task. There is a lot of advice online on how to successfully run or organise a casting process. This type of advice is probably pertinent, but it won’t satisfy Lambert-wild and Malaguerra’s poetic impertinence, and especially not Bernard-Marie Koltès’ irreverent writing. This is why we speak instead of encounters, because it is what this is actually about: meeting someone we don’t know yet, someone we couldn’t have imagined existed, someone other, someone who is not like us. These people open up worlds wider and more colourful than the ones we had projected onto each of the play’s characters. The point is not to pick an actor or an actress because they more or less fit the idea we had of a part. In theatre, ideas are risky business. Often, they end up withering backstage. Instead, we believe it is important to pick an actor or an actress because of their ability to reveal mysteries that we hadn’t suspected existed. 

 

After several intense days, where we were able to see and measure each actor’s talent and commitment, we have had to make a decision and decided to cast the whole of the NTCK’s permament company. This way, and even though we weren’t forced to do so, we respected the inherent harmony that transforms a company into an ensemble working as one, where individuals know one another and come together as one, a homogenous and powerful whole that makes each scene alive and coherent.  

We have been rehearsing for the past fifteen days, and each moment we spend in the rehearsal room confirms that we made the right decision. Each collaborator’s way of looking at things nurtures everyone else’s eyes. This happens because everyone is in high spirits and is rigorous, straightforward, exigent and quiet. Working with a company has strong advantages of course: a daily theatre practice that creates cohesion between the actors, something that is harder to achieve, and made more uncertain, when performers are confronted to the loneliness inherent to long and scattered periods of engagement.

 

The NTCK’s company puts actresses and actors at the heart of its institution. For each project, it provides a team of experts, within which individuals support one another and who, together, go through the intensity of sharing an instant. This means they are able to give an audience emotions that express a shared ethics. Performing becomes a way to interpret, together, the greatness of an unknown that we would never have been able to discover on our own. 

Jean Lambert-wild and Lorenzo Malaguerra

 

Show

The story of Bernard-Marie Koltès’ Roberto Zucco, based on Roberto Succo’s infamous journey, is set in...