Introduction

The previous chapter offered an overview of the history of Monticchiello and its theatre, drawing on past contact and conversations, but also relying on documents and literature to map the past. By contrast, this chapter puts fieldwork experiences firmly at the centre of its account of the plays staged during the period of most active fieldwork, ending with the 2004 play, Fola 04. The themes that emerged in the previous chapter led to a view of the Teatro Povero as a theatre of problems, offering a potential space for an apprenticeship in how to manage difference. Intensive differences were gradually being brought to near surreal tension, with a gradual erosion of boundaries between timeframes and all action contained in one act in the more recent plays.

This chapter begins with field notes related to attending the 2002 performance of TEPOPOTRATOS, where issues of survival surface once more at the hand of one of the theatre's initiatives, a museum of popular theatre traditions. More background is then given for the museum initiative and to the 2002 play, extending the outline begun through field notes. The play's main themes were centred on the dangers of fossilisation, implicit in the museum project, and a loss of direction and internal conflict around different strategies for the village's survival. There is then a brief theoretical interpretation of the theatre's attachment to popular traditions and the theatre company's adamant refuting of claims that it might be turning the sharecropping past into its myth.