An all-consuming Passion

The village is a kind of Christian Disneyland, the houses like iced cakes decorated with frescoes of Biblical stories. Every second shop is packed to the rafters with exquisitely gaudy woodcarvings of Biblical figures. On top of the Kofel mountain, a crag that broods over the valley, stands a vast cross, a statement of intent raised long ago by the faithful.

For centuries the village enjoyed a reputation as a place set apart from the corruption of the world, a kind of peasant paradise. This has always been more myth than actuality, of course, and today progress has truly caught up with the town in the shape of fashion boutiques, video shops, a Chinese takeaway named Hong Phuc and a Mexican-themed restaurant in the lee of the church, where the performers adjourn for beers and burritos after rehearsals.

Everywhere there is an eerie mix of the sacred and the banal. On my arrival at the theatre I sit down to wait in a backstage office. On the table is the normal detritus of everyday life: cigarette butts in saucers, crates of beer, a box of chocolate biscuits where the plain chocolate biscuits have been left until last. But around them are the traces of another world: a crown of thorns at a jaunty angle on a yellow polystyrene head, Flash Gordon-style feathered angel’s wings, a donkey’s saddle, rolled parchments in Hebrew and on the wall a vast oil painting, dated 1862, of the crucifixion.

As evening

Article source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/7559536/An-all-consuming-Passion.html