Review: Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s season opener Roberto Zucco provokes and disturbs | Canada Voices

• Title: Roberto Zucco
• Written by: Bernard-Marie Koltès, translated by Martin Crimp
• Director: ted witzel
• Actors: Samantha Brown, Jakob Ehman, Fiona Highet, Daniel MacIvor, Kwaku Okyere, Oyin Oladejo
• Company: Buddies in Bad Times
• Venue: Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
• City: Toronto
• Year: To Oct. 5, 2024

He was Public Enemy Number One.

In 1986, having spent half of a 10-year sentence in psychiatric prison for killing his parents, Italian serial killer Roberto Succo escaped and spent the next two years on a spree of sexual violence and murder across four countries before being returned to jail, where he committed suicide. At that time, French playwright Bernard-Marie Koltès, known for his avant-garde work at New York’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, was facing an AIDS diagnosis, his own death sentence.

Koltès’ final play, Roberto Zucco, took on a heavily fictionalized version of Succo’s sensational story, exploring the antihero’s murderous impulses and his victims’ attraction to self-destruction. Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s season opener of this alienating work about alienation, helmed by artistic director ted witzel, presents a series of stark, cruel scenes designed to disturb and provoke. The result may not be to every audience member’s taste, but the production’s commitment to aesthetic makes for a memorably strange and disaffected evening.

Set designer Michelle Tracey does a lot with a little, using three flats, a bench, an abused pay phone and Logan Raju Cracknell’s lurid lighting to create the atmosphere of a punk concert. A shaft of neon green glare pours out of a sewer grating downstage, Zucco crashing through one graffitied wall to announce his presence. As an efficient stage crew rotates these walls, they become chintzy apartments, prison barriers, a subway station, a den of iniquity in rough Little Chicago, and even a park outfitted with rolled-out plastic grass. An LED scroller announces the titles of the disconnected scenes we’re about to see, a series of metaphorical film strips about Zucco’s life. As his reign of terror progresses, the set gradually fills with wanted posters, blinds, and grates bearing his face.

That “angelic” face is one of Roberto Zucco’s many contradictions, it and his nervous affect belying his ability to commit casual, almost aimless murder. Though his actions are wantonly destructive, Jacob Ehman’s portrayal makes it clear that Zucco is more reactive than active, looking almost lost as he responds to the cruelty of the world around him.

The only character with a name instead of a descriptor like Brother or Guard, Zucco’s paradoxically worried that this name will be forgotten. At the same time, he also fears being noticed, wishing to “become transparent,” while his actions ensure he does anything but. The comparative anonymity and double-casting of the characters around him makes them seem more disposable, as though they only exist – or cease to exist – through their relationships to him.

In her exhausted anger that Zucco has chosen to return to the home he’s destroyed, his ill-fated mother (Fiona Highet) tells him, “If a train goes off the track, you don’t try to put it back. You leave it.” Her opinion that Zucco is ruined for life glaringly juxtaposes with the judgment of another recurring character, a young teenaged girl (a stone-faced Samantha Brown) who becomes obsessed with Zucco after they have a tryst and he tells her he is a secret agent.

While Zucco has chosen to murder, the girl’s family condemns her to an off-track life for the loss of her virginity from rape. It would be a stretch to call the play feminist, but the message about social mores is clear: men are ruined by what they do, women by what is done to them.

Treated as beyond saving, the girl silently regards her siblings as they rant in her direction. Her older sister (Oyin Oladejo) babies her, encouraging her to hide away, while her formerly overprotective older brother (Kwaku Okyere) now degrades his charge and seeks to hasten her on a path to prostitution.

The protracted one-sided conversations, one character holding court while another watches, are typical of Koltès’ rhythmically difficult script (in translation by Martin Crimp). The cast is still settling into these rhythms, but Highet is a standout as Zucco’s dismissive mother, a screaming prostitute, and a woman Zucco encounters in a park who is so callous and self-centred she frightens the multiple murderer. Buddies veteran Daniel MacIvor also excels as an elderly man lost in the subway after dark, who may be a stand-in for the playwright, and in his Abbott and Costello-like exchanges with the entertaining Oladejo as two prison guards whose night watch turns into an ontological discussion about reality and perception.

Through Zucco, Koltès opines that each of us, beasts who barely tolerate each other, is but one choice away from flipping a brain switch that will allow us to kill indiscriminately. He avoids assigning Zucco any type of real motive in performing his depraved actions, presenting him as a random element to be studied. Instead, Zucco becomes a kind of Icarus, aiming higher as his behaviour goes lower: he strips himself bare as he literally reaches for the sun.

While Roberto Zucco is brutal and violent in its eloquently ugly language and the presence of more than one on-stage murder, it now feels almost quaint rather than truly shocking; an intellectual exercise and experimental period piece. The lack of dramatic tension and emotional involvement results from Koltès’ intentional alienation, using stylized language, lengthy monologues, and self-aware performances and design to create the type of detachment Bertolt Brecht was looking for in Epic Theatre. It’s possible to step back and contemplate the horror without too much emotional pain – but whether that’s a good thing is anybody’s guess.

In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)