Category: Review

Macbettu

Let’s say someone had blindfolded me, and accommodated me in a reserved top-tier. Lights off in the theatre, and all set on stage, once unblinded, Alessandro Serra’s Macbettu — for Sardegna Teatro, would immediately reveal to me its being an unmissable theatrical event. Mastery in lightning design, a wide, almost operatic, ‘abundant emptiness’, soon discloses the sense of a deep investigation.

The seeds of a project of international scale, are to be found in a photo feature in the course of a Sardinian carnivalesque seven days held in Barbagia. Cortèges of ‘witches, lunatics, custodians, and victims’, horns, goat bells, antique instruments made of animal skin, hooded tunics dressed men, resentful, and desperate gazes for the infertility of the ground. ‘Carrasecare’, after all, holds in its name a tragic, and mourning taste — ‘meat to be torn’.

«Those men, — explains the director, impressed me for their powerful gestures, and voices. For the closeness, and familiarity they seem to have with Dionysus, while at the same time for the extreme formal precision in their dances, and chants». Seemingly, an anthropological set of habits fitting to a tee, what he was looking for in order to produce his personal version of Macbeth. Sullen cloaks. Red wine. The attempt to domesticate Nature. Mostly, though, a somber wintertime.

The director believes his interest for the Scottish character comes from his being, as Emil Cioran would say, a great thinker, in some way as Hamlet might be considered to be. Besides the circumstances, — «he states something of a devastating profundity. Life is just a walking shadow. Macbeth cannot help but plan for the future, again, and again, tomorrow… Impossible for him to live in the present so much is he projected forward».

Four heavy iron slabs are vertically settled in the middle of the scene, loud noises from behind. Three iconic old hags, — as in ‘befanas’ crones, declare, almost hilariously, the superstitious lines. The plot is therefore set in motion, and true to the purest Elizabethan decree, men only will deliver it on. Not in a ‘translated’ Shakespearean language, but in a precise dialect that is intentionally chosen in order not to fall into a plain literary practice.

The essential scene — although full of performative mastery, holds signs of primordial, feral forces: blood, hostile as in ‘warlike’ postures, dry soil, dust, irregular pointed stones, — weapons in essence, trees’ barks, cork. The latter not being intended to vehicle some sort of ancient residual Nuragic civilisation, but rather to share a set of inner emotional elements aimed to establish a communication with the receiver of a message that is beyond time, and space.

The impatient character, unable to bear the supernatural, so much empty of Love as he is, irresistibly turns into the (co)-author of such a horrendous, as much as useless evil act. Proportions seem to be a rather meaningful semantic trait here. Small as Macbettu! is, — repeatedly yelled with a strong accent, although not as in an ambition igniting ‘hail’, but rather as in a child cherishing call.

Leader of a horde of warriors that are boars in essence manifesting their animal nature, on all fours in the course of an oinking banquet, Lady Macbeth supervises from above. Impeccably incarnated by Fulvio Accogli with his long hair, ephebic ‘allure’ despite a beard — she is a much taller commander than the ‘fake’ king himself, seating on his minuscule throne, almost a baby seat defended only by spear pointy backrests.

Each scene is an artistic frame. Impossible to say which one is the most beautiful.
The splendid parade of the tribal chiefs wearing man-shaped cork’s masks, won by Nature refusing do be domesticated. Unique, yet, and quite possibly unreachable in intensity, the superbly uncanny and mellow death of the ‘fake’ queen. ‘What’s done is done and cannot be undone’. Lightly, almost floating on the floor, a transgendered levity, magnificent in nudity, she will reach a scaffold of her choice, and let her loveless self, go.

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False Hamlet

What if Ophelia and Hamlet reunited in the afterlife? Liberated — eventually, from the conditionings of a narration whose demands are of them to wear the skin of tiny fragile creatures in a fate of folly (is it?) and death? Such a linear, almost ‘pink’, mind, as mine, has — in a very poorly hamletic fashion, no doubts whatsoever. That would be the ideal chance to live at last, as they please, an infantine, delicate love which had to be sacrificed on the altar of a tragedy. False Hamlet – Opera Teatrale in Fa maggiore director and playwright Andrea Cramarossa has a different idea, as in his version he imagines those post-mortem souls to confront each other again in a purgatorial dimension yet not for any presumed sin.

Nothing gets to transform anything into a happy ending, hélas, in the poetics of this production signed Teatro delle Bambole, since Hamlet/Ophelia/Hamlet/Ophelia, in a sequence of prolonged soliloqui, are not quite capable of becoming ‘one’, not at the price of reiterating the myth of their very personal ‘repetition’. Federico Gobbi comes in from behind the public, illuminating each and every one with one of those speleology headlights, therefore beginning an actual hermeneutical excavation, which is not only concretely blinding, but requires also a pause to the sight, in order to give priority to the hearing as a deep listening.

So much dense is the author’s penmanship as a poet, in fact, that one needs to darken one’s mind. There is very little, and very little happens, on the other hand, on stage. Perhaps a rehearsal room, or that ‘court tiny theatre’ set up to flush out the murderer, still suspended in duration at the moment of the disclosure itself. Together with this already double semantic dimension, Hamlet’s poetizing presence meeting Ophelia in the end, the talented Isabella Careccia, a string of videos with no audio inserts itself on the backcloth. Could they be memories — in the one danced attempt of spiritual ‘enhancement’ following “Tiomnaja noch” (Into the Dark). Surely the truth behind the fiction of ‘theatre’.

This is what ‘False Hamlet’ is, the hyperbolic elevation of false-true, fictitious-real dialectics, in the land of the ‘symbol’ — yet discovered in a previous project by the ensemble from Bari while investigating the life of fireflies —, ending up turning those tiny fragile creatures into small willingless ‘wicks’, symbiotic in the other side as well. Such a hard work ‘to be true’ it is, that the director-playwright imagines them in a scrubbed field, dressed up as on stage, despite dog masks, disillusioned, and almost joyfully resigned to their scenic identity. Incommunicable, so much so, to end up speaking other idioms.

Reflecting in theatrical terms this is a performance more than it is a ‘tale’. For one entire week I have been pondering the nice ‘scene-pictures’, post-modern, kind of in a vintage way. Most of all, however, ruminating the script, as it unavoidably calls one back in, as a protraction of the cruel Scene I, Act III. Reflecting in poetical terms this is an ambitious, yet successful attempt of going beyond Shakespeare. The action on stage, though, still needs some more breathe, out of the philosophical roots of the poetic lines, into the flesh.

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