The play, based on Pirandello’s work, makes its national debut in Spoleto, directed and performed by Gabriele Lavia.
Gabriele Lavia, one of the most prolific and famous theatrical interpreters of the last decades, has chosen the Teatro Nuovo Gian Carlo Menotti of Spoleto to stage and make his national debut with Il Berretto a Sonagli. The show is based on the work of Luigi Pirandello, will be on stage Sunday, February 6 at 5 pm for the 2021/2022 Prose Season, sees Lavia in the dual role of director and performer. On stage he will be together with Federica Di Martino, Francesco Bonomo, Matilde Piana, Maribella Piana, Mario Pietramala, Giovanna Guida and Beatrice Ceccherini.
This morning, Lavia met the students of the classical high school and of the scientific high school at the Complesso Monumentale di San Nicolò, an occasion to know and listen to his theatrical experience and the preparatory work that the company is carrying out in these days at the Teatro Nuovo Gian Carlo Menotti in view of the performance on 6 February.
“For Luigi Pirandello, life is an overcrowded threshold of nothingness. All his work revolves around this nothingness crowded with appearances, with shadows that stir in pain and madness – explains Lavia in the director’s notes – Only the characters are real and alive. Il Berretto a Sonagli is a tragedy of the mind. But it wears the mask of farce on its face. Pirandello puts an old man on stage, one of those invisible men without importance, crushed in the grip of life and treated as if he were nothing: ‘Oh, was I nothing?‘ This desperate question hides the tortured and proud conception of himself, of a man dissolved in the nothingness of the world, a nothingness crowded by puppets and human ghosts who spy and speak. They speak words already spoken, consumed – continues the director – And on our stage they are as if found by chance: an old, abandoned backdrop and a few elements, relics of a bourgeois living room where a banal piece of life of a respectable family is represented, maybe not that respectable, that deals with the nagging anxiety of having to be for the others, in front of the others. As if one’s own life were, by statute, a play for the others, unjust and ferocious spectators of one’s own life, of one’s own theatre. The life of men who are nothing more than a sign pointing to nothingness, made up of appearances, of ghosts, of everything that the self is for others. It is being-for-others that gets the upper hand because being-with-others is in any case our inescapable being (…) Ciampa uses bars on the doors, bolts, poles to defend his ego, but to no avail. He is forced to go out, to get his hands dirty – Sartre would say – to exist. But to exist means putting oneself at stake. And so the civil rope and the serious rope are no longer needed. It is the crazy rope that snaps. And it snaps for everyone. One cannot defend one’s self from the attacks of the world. It is not possible to get out of the world, to get out of ourselves. If we do, we are the living dead.
To access the theatre, a Super Green Pass and ffp2 mask are required. You can reserve by calling 075 57 54 22 22, on weekdays from 4pm to 8 pm. Reserved tickets shall be collected not any later than half an hour prior to the show. You can also purchase tickets on www.teatrostabile.umbria.it.
