With the lecture by University professor Fabienne Crastes “Po-et(h)ics of war in plays by Matéi Visniec, Laurent Gaudé and Wajdi Mouawad: theatre as ‘battlefield’” the activities for the second morning of the “War and Theatre in the 21st Century” have come to a close.

The premise for this talk is as follows: raising the issue of war is raising the issue of the narrative. Crastes proposes a reflection on the “narration of current war(s) from theatre”, taking the works by Matéi Visniec, Laurent Gaudé and Wajdi Mouawad as a starting point; at the same time, she tries to highlight the features and peculiarities of some anti-heroic “tales” which play out in a double perspective, an oscillating movement between updating and “essentialisation”, history and myth, fragmentation and link, synchrony and diachrony, plurality and unit. It appears as if in these texts war po-et(h)ics are created, featuring oppositions and paradoxes, in an attempt to include History in its catastrophic dimension, highlighting human sense and stating the need for superiority of words.