It seems that Dublin is not the worst place to start conquering the theatre scene. For Dead Centre, in any case, it worked well: during recent years, the theatrical collective consisting of the two young Brits Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel has become a name to be reckoned with on the European cultural scene. “In Ireland we have just the right measure of outsider’s bitterness, enabling us to take a clear-sighted look at the realities of life,” Kidd explains. The philosophical search for what is actual reality, and how theatre can represent this reality, runs like a red thread through the duo’s productions, which have been shown at Vienna’s Burgtheater and Berlin’s Schaubühne, among others. Each of their productions is a balancing act between substance and appearance, between astonishing realism and a conscious revealing of the techniques of illusion the theatre uses to suggest reality to us. No wonder that their most notable works include evenings on Sigmund Freud and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The production IL TEOREMA DI PASOLINI brings Dead Centre to an opera house for the first time: “To us this is a challenge: usually we write our own scripts, but here the score dictates the evening’s pace,” says Kidd, “and while the composer is still writing the music, we are already thinking about what the piece might look like on the opera stage.”