Review: Inferno, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be: if there is one. It is what is already there, the inferno where we live everyday, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilence and apprehension; seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities

From its very first image, Romeo Castellucci’s Inferno leaves us in no doubt as to our position as its subject. The word itself, a near-neon sign flickering and buzzing towards the back of the stage, acts as our collective title, framing us both as exhibit and accused. Where Sartre denounced other people as hell, Castellucci drop-kicks each one of us into that collective noun. We – all of us – are the inferno. Not some unknowable, ineffable elsewhere, but here, now, us: this blistering mass of body-heat blindly protesting the sanctity of life in the face of its squalidity.

The ninety minutes that follow, for all the scale and grandeur of the individual images contained, consist solely of bilious condemnation. Eloquent, bold and extraordinary bilious condemnation, but bilious condemnation nonetheless. True, Castellucci sets the mind whirring with dense ambiguity and inflicts a squirming revulsion with the sheer viscerality of his content, but, as a whole, the piece is so unswerving in its damnation that it lacks the development to engage a range of emotions. Watching Inferno a bit like receiving the hairdryer treatment from an opera singer: a bombard of beauty too intense to be appreciated.

However, you will struggle to find a more visually arresting string of images. You can almost feel them burning irrevocably onto your retina, like the startling flash of a Polaroid camera, even as you take them in.

Castellucci begins with an image of the classical underworld. He walks onto the now letterless, empty stage and announces himself, before dressing in a padded suit and allowing himself to be attacked by guard dogs. It is a curious mix of real and represented danger that almost serves as a marker for the contemptuous picture of human existence that follows.

Inside a glass box, children play with colourful balloons, unaware of the black, threatening world outside. Their sound is amplified and strangely disconcerting; their play increasingly destructive. Above them bulges a tumour of cloud. Into the dark storm steps the figure of Andy Warhol, oddly plasticized in his movements. As he snaps us with a Polaroid and enacts birth, pointing upwards with the accusatory finger of Death, Warhol seems the recurring surveyor of this Inferno; an anthropologist of Hell.

Castellucci’s other components are equally striking. A mechanical skeleton crawls across the stage. A skull is shattered. A white horse is splashed with stage blood. A grand piano burns. He marches an army of people, dressed in bright synthetic colours onto the stage. By turns, they seem an ocean, a pilgrimage and the tip of a queue stretching absently through the world in which the whole of humanity waits for their moment onstage.

Even their enactments of human kindness – caring hugs, passionate kisses, parental play and guidance – seem coated in slime, somehow containing traces of the repulsive. Even choice, a man’s head ticking between two women, becomes an endless, insoluble dilemma. Finally, they slit one another’s throats with murderous embraces in a vicious game of wink murder. There exist no innocent victims, only a last murder standing amidst his own ruins, searching for someone to end his existence. Finally, at the hands of a child, he turns to the audience, smiles and exits the inferno.

Castellucci’s piece is the antithesis of American Beauty’s plastic bag moment. Where the latter sees only beauty, he perceives horror. Inferno is a piece that never snaps or bites, never rages, riles or rallies. Instead, it quietly hollows, softly and slowly, as if imperceptibly gnawing out your insides: an acid that painlessly erodes and dissolves until nothing worthwhile remains.