In the Eye of the Storm: Refugee-Responsive Shakespeare on the Italian Stage

In “We Refugees”, a short essay published in 1993, Giorgio Agamben builds on Hannah Arendt’s seminal thinking about WWII diaspora to call for a radical shift in our understanding of the condition of refugee and its bearing on Europe’s identity and political future. Rather than as a problem to be cured or contained, he argues, refugees should be seen an opportunity for a much-needed renewal of the conceptual categories that underpin the European construction. As a stateless person, the refugee breaks up the identity between man and citizen and in this way lays bare the incompatibility between the universalist concept of human rights and the exclusionary notion of territorial sovereignty. Agamben’s call to reconstruct our political philosophy seems even more urgent today, faced as we are with a humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented proportions and an equally devastating crisis of Europe as a political community. Now more than ever, the very survival of the EU seems dependent on its ability, as a new continent of immigration, to evolve a different paradigm of political subjectivity. Judging from the impressive amount of Shakespeare performances about and/or by refugees that have been staged in and around Europe over the past few years, it seems clear that a growing number of artists and activists today see his works as providing a particularly suitable tool for engaging meaningfully and ethically with the current crisis. In this article I consider two recent Italian performance interventions that reframe the plays as contemporary tales of forced displacement and refuge. While differing significantly in terms of approach, style of presentation and context of production, both take Shakespeare into “the eye of the storm” by focusing on the Mediterranean corridor, the perceived epicentre of the European migration crisis in the 2010s and a major stresspoint for the EU as a political community. The aim of my analysis is to provide insight into the cognitive and political firepower that Shakespeare can afford or has been seen as affording at the present juncture, and to examine the strategies that have been used to activate these possibilities in and through performance.