“My name is Romeo Castellucci”. The opening scene of Inferno begins with the creator and director striding onto the stage, announcing these words, getting changed into a thick padded (meat-impregnated?) suit, and being set upon by live, barking Alsatian dogs who maul him violently for five minutes, welcoming us Cerberus-style to the gates of hell.
     Inferno is part of the United Kingdom premiere of this trilogy, “freely inspired by” Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, created by Castellucci and the Societas Raffaello Sanzio which he founded in 1981 with his wife and sister. Inferno and Purgatorio are 90 minute performances in the Barbican Theatre, Paradiso is an installation in the Silk Street theatre. This is a review of Inferno and Paradiso.
     The poet Virgil is replaced by Andy Warhol as our guide to the circles of hell. We are presented with a series of tableaux; some beautiful, and all strange. After the dogs have been called off stage by a police whistle, a large cube is initially a mirror in which the audience finds its own reflection. The mirror turns to glass, revealing a cube of real live toddlers playing together, their voices amplified, unaware of the billowing black ball swirling over their heads. In other scenes a skull is crushed under a wall, a piano goes up in flames, a white horse has red paint thrown over it.
     There are some clear references to Dante’s poem; we see boatmen in the River Styx, an adulterer caught between his two women, and murderers slitting each other’s throats. A number of the images hint at big themes: a series of people fling themselves off a roof, to a backdrop of the titles of Andy Warhol images, people hug each other and kill each other in one movement, and individuals appear from the crowd and are then subsumed into the anonymous masses. Although it is always worth seeing the master of imagery at work, the overall effect is more impressive than moving, and the avant-garde techniques feel a little old; crashing jarring sounds and slow motion.
     Paradiso is likewise interesting rather than awe inspiring. You are led from a bright white room through a small black hole into a pitch black room with water running down one wall. When your eyes become accustomed to the dark you realise that a man is struggling and groaning in a hole at the top of the wall, and the watcher feels unnervingly watched, as well as perhaps a sense that this might have fallen on the pretentious side of performance art. It would no doubt have been more impressive in the church in Avignon where it first appeared.
     The theme continues with a film called Inferno on 19th April, and the rest of the SPILL Festival of Performance 2009 (an international festival of experimental theatre, live art and performance) runs until 29 April.
Maya Lester