Ajax

Ájax

Theatre

Friday 2 October · 19:00

A theatrical adaptation of Sophocles' 'Ajax', one of his earliest tragedies, exploring the limits of power and serving as a response to totalitarian threats. The performance, premiering at TMJB, crosses the text with testimonies, narratives, and artistic interventions to create a sharp, human theater that looks us in the eye.

Aias or Ajax Telamonius or, simply, Ajax the Great, was at the end of the Trojan War, considered the second best Greek warrior, just behind Achilles. With the failed attempt to assassinate Ulysses and his army, Ajax falls into disgrace and commits suicide. But his half-brother, Teucer, despite the dishonor of suicide and the opposition of Agamemnon and Menelaus, decides to pay him due honors. Who, like Ajax, driven by primary instincts such as the impulse for revenge for an injustice, has not been a victim of illusions caused either by their own weaknesses, by the intervention of others, or by an event or a certain social context? The information age or, rather, the discrediting of information and the fog that so often surrounds its sources is today the ideal context for the development and spread of cruel, unjust, anti-democratic, and regressive political discourses, social measures, and ideologies. Thus, little by little, the path is drawn towards the total eclipse of the universal declaration of human rights and human dignity and the rights of all sentient living beings, and thus profoundly inhuman acts are permitted, vulgarized, and disseminated globally. How to face this era, this time, this threat to the complete and abysmal degradation of our civilizational values? We live, then, under constant attacks on democracy and civilizational evolution. The absence of dialogue, extremisms, and the deafening noise of our time gain strength and perpetrate their attack through the weakening of thought and, consequently, of discernment. Limitations on freedom of expression, disinformation, or its manipulation, and its political and economic exploitation undermine the heart of democracy. What to do in the face of installed social dementia, in the face of social hysteria manifested in consumerism and unbridled speed? Sophocles' Ajax is a reflection on the limits of power and is also, it seems to us, a response to totalitarian and totalizing threats. A response that comes from the depths of our civilization and from the cradle of democracy. Starting from the text of Ajax, probably Sophocles' earliest tragedy, this show, which premieres at TMJB, makes a theatrical approach to the text and to the figure of Sophocles, crossing them with testimonies, narratives, and artistic interventions in order to create an original and sharp object. What we propose, given the context we live in, is the presentation of a deeply human theater that returns our gaze. A theater eye to eye.