The Infinite Pleasure of the Great Unknown, is a theatrical celebration of the death of reality. The fictional master criminal Dr Mabuse has set his heart on total world domination. He escapes the confines of both his own death and the silver screen and finds himself on the virtual battle-field of the unreal. He infiltrates the hidden networks that make up a war on terror and waits for something to happen.
King Lear has gone insane and misses his cue to die. Instead he wanders for eternity in a landscape of his own making. A storm of language, perpetually being re-translated in an attempt to find meaning.
The Infinite Pleasure of the Great Unknown is the new theatre show by Bock & Vincenzi. After the seven-year project ‘Invisible Dances’, Simon Vincenzi takes as his starting point two fictional characters – the filmic creation of Dr Mabuse and the theatrical character of King Lear. Within the three Fritz Lang films of Dr Mabuse, the master criminal understands that "When mankind becomes ruled by terror, then is the hour for the mastery of crime”. He operates within three very different political landscapes: the economic chaos of Berlin in 1922, where his continual shape-shifting allowed his ‘gambling’ of the stock market to bring reason to economic ruin; the self determination for unprecedented control in 1933 has clear connections to the rise of Hitler (this film was in fact banned by the Nazi’s) and the final film, a labyrinth of surveillance and paranoia, mirrored a 1960 Europe of Cold War fear of invasion.
These two arcs of power/loss are played against each other. Both texts deal with the terror of the unknown and use of different languages as a controlling force. A battle between the image and the text.
The script of King Lear will be re-translated through the on-line translating facility Babel Fish to re-create a scrambled language of new meanings.

Date:
28 June 2008

Venue:   Polverigi (AN)
Villa Nappi -Via Marconi 75, Polverigi

Information:
tel. 071 9090007