Mono Monday: Connections

This is a one-man show acted and directed by Luciano Travaglino, called Récits d'un Fracassé de Guerre. All we knew about it was that it was about war -- I assumed the First World War, given the anniversary, but in fact it is about the liberation of Rome in 1944. Tenuously anyway; what started as stories told by the author's father about his childhood wandered off into all sorts of strange byways connected via the various characters. A stolen pig, a barrowload of corpses, a buried Russian, an old man licking raw potatoes, a boy pissing into a German soldier's upturned helmet from the branches of a tree ... At one point he was telling a long and involved story about a man in a concentration camp with a pet fly, and the reason flies eat shit and corpses. It's all to do with the Virgin Mary and the Holy Sepulchre. "How on earth did we get to here?" we wondered.

Eventually all the tangled threads joined up and the characters were reunited in Rome. It was quite a tour de force. Sadly there were only about a dozen people in the audience, so it was all very intimate, and the actor stayed for a chat afterwards. I only took three photos because in this situation I didn't want to be a distraction by constantly clicking away. It was this rather fuzzy shot, or a photo of my beautifully layered Danish pastry dough, and I felt this fitted the brief better.