For the Good of All

Ordinary people in an ordinary border town. On the other side of the border, other people: dangerous by definition. They, too, are very ordinary people, just like the border town people. But different: they are foreigners and, above all, undesirable. So the local population organises. They organise into small, but highly motivated groups of neighbourhood watches that function as protection from the immigrants; they organise into groups of night watches on the riverbank that is, in fact, the border. They are united and determined they won’t let anyone cross it. When one of the foreigners does manage to cross the river, they catch him, and his fate is now in the hands of a group of privileged townsfolk (the supermarket owner and his wife, the mechanic and his daughter, the doctor, a young extremist and a council clerk), whose traits the author sketches roughly, in an unpunctuated text.

Through their “search” for the answers about what to do with the illegal immigrant, the author reveals their darkest passions, the real reason for their emotions and acts, the faulty principles that their “healthy” and “good” intentions dictate, and through them, reveals and reflects the horrifying insensitivity of contemporary society, its xenophobia, and above all, the fear of the unknown and of all that is socially unacceptable.

Italian playwright Francesco Randazzo (1963) wrote the play For the Good of All, which is even more topical today that it was when it was written, based on a real event, and won the 1996 Candoni Arta Terme Award for it.