ABSTRACT
We are supposed to arrive on time for the theatre. There is a designated hour on our tickets and, in the more well-appointed places, a five minute and maybe even before that a ten minute hurry-up bell, and there is sometimes a notice on our tickets or signs on the theatre foyer wall (Latecomers Will Not Be Admitted, or at least not until a suitable break in the performance) reminding us of the consequences of tardiness. Perhaps, though, as we have been suggesting throughout the previous chapters, for all our best efforts there is no way not to be late for the theatre – and also no way to get a jump on what Rebecca Schneider, for one, has referred to as theatre's ‘always already anachronistic, always almost but not quite obsolescence’ – and we know this is the case, and so does the theatre. 1 So it is, on the outskirts of the northern Italian city of Bologna in early 2014, that a number of us turn up for a show called Giudizio, Possibilità, Essere [Judgment, Possibility, Being] that is being staged at an old-fashioned public gymnasium – the floor marked out for basketball and other games, nets at either end, wooden climbing frames along the walls, a few of the polystyrene tiles in the ceiling displaced I presume by basketball attack. The first thing that happens when the show eventually starts (it starts a little late, there is a wait for latecomers) is a sort of prelude. This involves a short text – I think of silent cinema caption boxes – projected onto a small self-assembly screen from a whirring, blinking home-movie film projector, operated by a young woman whose dun-coloured long skirt and shawl suggest the dress styles of the nineteenth century. The captions tell us about the sound that is starting to fill the gymnasium space, a slow-rushing roar like that of a massive wind blowing from another world. Which is indeed what it is: as the text on the screen explains, what we are hearing is X-ray activity converted into signals discernible to the human ear and collected by a NASA outer space telescope from the vicinity of a Black Hole in a star cluster in the Milky Way, 250 million light years from earth. We are listening to something that sounded – if sounded is what it ever did – a long time ago. It is a reconstructed phenomenon, technologically reconstructed but also a thing of the imagination, that puts everything else, as the saying goes, ‘in perspective’: the young woman's quaint costume, the rather arcane film projection apparatus (later on in the evening, on the side of the main action, we will be treated to what look like super-saturated, early colourfilm slides: fields, flowers, verdant hills and bright chalets), and not least the schooldays-evoking community gym. Compared to that stellar wind, given such inconceivable distances in space and time, these other elements are only the latest breaths of human history, mixed together in the same mouth. Maybe lateness at the theatre is only one way, and a minor way at that, of being unpunctual for the images, of finding ourselves shaken loose into the gaps between other historical bits and pieces that have their own sense of assurance as to where they stand in relation to each other. Anyway I retain the feeling – even at the end when the actors will make their individual final exits amongst us, walking between us, so close, like ghosts that have put on actual flesh and warmth – that we are still late enough.
