Human society as provocation

Photo: Sören Vilks

The tutelage is a collaboration between the Stockholm City Theater and the Al-Harah feminist theater in Palestine. The nine actresses participate in a film projected on a huge piece behind the Swedish actors.

The "protection seekers" were written by Aischylos 2,500 years ago. At Stockholm City Theater, it becomes a sophisticated theater machine with an important message for our time.

Aischylos saw the problem 2500 years ago. What should be evaluated at the highest? The well-being of citizens or the vulnerability of the refugee?

Aischylos was a democrat. In his drama "The Protectorate", King Pelasgos turns to the people to make a democratic decision. And people say yes to the refugees. They can stay.

It's easy to understand the curiosity of playing this drama at a time when the priority is different. Almost all Swedish political parties emphasize that the standard of living of citizens is more important than the opportunity for refugees to lead dignified lives. The theater can protest against this. And it is such a director of the event Dritëro Kasapi was staged at the Stockholm City Theater.

Kasapi chose a theme in 2016 with Anders Lustgartens "Lampedusa" in the Stockholm City Theater, a thoughtful and well-directed portrayal of refugees taking place in the Mediterranean.

With "The Guardian", in the treatment of David Greig, he did not ease the task. The performance is a collaboration with the Al-Harah theater in Palestine, with a feminist vocation. The nine actresses participate in a film projected on a huge piece behind the Swedish actors. What we see then is actually a reading of Aischylo's text that deals with a group of women flying over the ocean from their country, Egypt, facing the threat of collective restraint. They arrive in Argos, where King Pelasgos is the first to doubt that they let them into the country, threatening a war with which women move away, but which then changes when they are in danger. he realizes their vulnerability. He wants to help women but fears the judgment of the post-judgment: "From a strange love, you despised your city".

The Al-Harah Theater trains flying women, Swedes come in and out of different roles and also reads the many driving parties, sometimes in the form of a Swedish translation of Arabic readings by Palestinian actors.

Several public interviews take place. For example, we can act among Argos citizens and vote for women to stay or not.

"The unprotected" is simply an advanced theater machine, a machine that leaves no room for so much formwork and sometimes masks the intrinsic nerve of the story. With one exception, Per Sandberg plays the role of Pelargos, the king with both hair but who ends up raking. Sandberg gives life to his parish and lands him more than anything else in our time. Pelargos understands the doubts of citizens, he does not despise them to integrate refugees into society, but he also manages to overthrow the opinion of Argos by presenting the right of asylum as an essential element of the construction of human rights as a society.

That such an attitude, 2,500 years old, seems distant and almost provocative today says a lot about our time.