NEXT is the Lombardy Region’s project, organised in collaboration with Fondazione Cariplo with the aim of distributing new live productions as well as promoting and strengthening the network of contacts between operators on a national and international level. For this edition, NEXT will be at the Piccolo Teatro with two shows: Taxi Light Vigil, by the Lumen company, and Tycoons, by the Servomuto Teatro collective of writers, actors, and directors.
What is a tool in comparison to a share? What is bank robbery compared to founding a bank? (Bertolt Brecht)
At the beginning of the last century, the stock exchange that we know today was founded; money became ever less real, and its value ever more open to manipulation. Western democracies began to create debt. The dream of a world built on abundance and prosperity seemed to have definitively failed. A handful of extraordinarily rich men controlled industry and finance and began to use their power to manipulate politics for both good and bad. Many observed these men and dreamed of joining their ranks. One of them, clutching his book of shares, decides to create his own destiny. Another, with pistol in hand, decides that his destiny has already been decided. Those turbulent years saw the birth of the most powerful central bank that the world had ever seen. It was the beginning of the Twentieth Century. After decades of instability and continuous crashes due to uncontrollable fluctuations and speculation, the American stock exchange, the most recent but already the most powerful of the stock exchanges, appeared to have finally gained stability, also thanks to the contribution of the great capitalists, the so-called tycoons, businessmen so powerful as to possess a wealth greater even that the state; men who, in the past, had already shown their ability to use their millions to influence an election campaign. This apparently ordered climate was characterised by underground movements and ideologies, politicians, and voters, divided between those who wanted the state to have firm control of the economy, currency and monopolies, and those who believed the market was destined for self-regulation and that a central bank was a dangerous and anti-democratic element. Anarchists, populists, brokers, politicians, the unemployed, magnates; each and every one has something to earn and something to lose, and they all want the same thing. If the American Dream leads to happiness through wealth, the stock exchange has become the place in which to become rich as quickly as possible and in an ever-riskier manner, and soon the country will once again be forced to ask tycoons for help.