”You have to invest yourself in full if you want to be a success”. That mantra is repeated again and again by the girl with the burning eyes. She herself has been willing to sacrifice everything. She has been through quite a lot to achieve exactly what she wants to achieve. Devotion, she preaches. “It pays off”. In other words, she’s willing to do anything.

Do anything for what? To obtain those 15 seconds of fame that she – maybe, probably not – stands on the edge of, with the audition for a dubious reality concept she is called for. You have to seize the chances you get, “because the train doesn’t stop at your stop everyday”.
In one long uninterrupted row of confessions she reveals her story; a flow of speech that proves which extremes she has been willing to expose herself to from an early age in order to gain success as a woman.

An endless stream of fascist wreckage, twisted body focus, father fixations, eating disorders, sexual humiliations, self-hatred and overestimation in a – well, a stream of “Lort” – hence the title of this fascinating, Italian monologue that Husets Teater is playing at the moment starring the phenomenon Danica Curcic in the sole part of the play.

When the audience enters the room she is sitting on a pedestal, almost as an exhibition object, in the empty white room. Defenseless: Please consume me.

The perfect symmetry of the naked body is sharply contrasted in the self-hatred that pours from the painted lips. The only prop is the microphone which allows her to both sing the Italian national anthem and to hold one of the many cocks she has met on her way heavily in the hand. This intercepts Danica Curcic’s thoroughly prepared performance which has it all.

The almost touching, girly insecurity of her flickering eyes, the affectionate cunning femininity. The shiny ice cold selfishness and narcissistic hysteria is ablaze when she effectively drives the self- assertion forward in furious crescendo that each time ends with a tearing scream: “It’s me, me, me!”

Vainlessly self-forgetting

Danica Curcic possesses exactly that duplicity which this monologue draws nourishment from: On the one hand the scary calculated unscrupulousness, on the other the smashed self-consciousness and helplessness. The freezing exposedness and the sharp wit.
And with her extraordinary melodic voice and technical brilliance she now and then makes the stream of words to a really thoroughly processed orchestrated piece of music when she gives the words their own timbre and colors.

It’s a very brave performance, vainlessly self-forgetting, and at the same time Danica Curcic keeps full control of her performance, brilliantly guided by Director Simon K. Boberg. She is a top tuned actress and it is first and foremost her presence that turns “Lort” into the experience it really is. The Italian playwright Cristian Ceresoli’s monologue of resistance may suffer a bit of redundancy but in general it’s a powerful poetic text with great dramatic quality.

A text that levels with this day and age, a scary abstraction of a new human consciousness, the type of suppressed slowly consumed human beings, the inevitable result of the values that prevail in Berlusconi’s Italy marked by a cultural collapse – or in any society that insists on letting stupidity and consumerism rule.

In a moment it’s us. Or is it us already? It’s almost too scary to think of.