Amleto take away

The ‘stage keeper’ asks the audience if they are ready. ‘Yes?’ ‘Good. Let’s start.’

Out of the dark a small set of red curtains gives frame to a crucified-like young man in a white monastic shirt.

‘I do suffer, though I dream
Because of this, I do live.
In the act of dreaming,
I do dive into ‘what I have inside’
That I see, even if it does not really live;
That I loose, if the day after, it turns into real.
Also, I do search for ‘who I am’,
‘who I fake to be’, ‘where I hide’,
In the act of dreaming, I do soothe the pain,
It is the only real sensation.
Life, in the end, is what, — in it, we do imagine:’

The ‘little scene in the scene’ moves towards the centre of the stage as the monologue proceeds, while an accordion, or a pianola, leads the pregnant words introducing Amleto Take Away — whose meaning does not echo ‘a Shakespearean meal to have at home’, but rather the question: ‘What do you want Hamlet?’ in the Bari parlance: Amleto-te-ce-uè?

Nothing more than what we feel, we have,
And this is where the reality of our living
Lies upon, not on what we see.
‘I do suffer, dream, feel, and I am alive, different each day.
This, is what is worth to be or to have,
so that we can be, and have, what we ‘imperfectly’ are.
Ah! If this too, too sullied flesh would melt …

Gianfranco Berardi — winner with this work of the Premio Ubu 2018 as best actor, literally lives his life in blindness, — hanging in the balance between light and shadow, and brings about this project with Gabriella Casolari, and her outstanding penmanship, as a manifesto of a ‘time which is actually out of joint’.

I am squashed, blinded,
Like a moth I do meander from a glass to another,
In the permanent quest of a fulfilling something
That some heat could give me,
In this dazzling world,
full of sparkling wonders,
where every single thing is upside down,
capsized.

In a rising rhythm, the monologue turns into a shout, almost a yell, against an unbearable here and now, as if the ‘micro-theater-in-the-theater’ released his hostage. Master of elocution, athletic, authentic word-machine, he bears the cross-micro-set on his shoulder as a modern hero.

The mood changes into the description of a world which is actually in a state of disorientation everywhere, no latitude excluded. Sadness, and despair, still resonating in the soul of the public, are to greet a new, old, story in the key of a tragicomic fresco of the ‘counter-entness’ we all live in.

There’s a Father and a Son and the broken Dream of a Life as an Actor because of a rare Disease.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, emblem of doubtfulness and hesitation, discomfort and inadequacy, has seemed to be to the duo-company the ideal character to entrust the leading baton of such a punctual query. This one Hamlet, though, favours a conscious failure more, rather than a shallow give away.

«To be or FB?» is his question. Sexting champion, and a fake winner of an old gone soccer championship wearing #9 on a blue and black shirt, this one Hamlet repudiates appearances in order to find himself as he really is, and his Ophelia, in a cameo of acting mastery — voice over voice, and dramaturgic talent.

The destiny of a codependent couple besieged into this economy. A real treat.

And then, all of a sudden,
All of a sudden the wining body.
We are alone, we are alone.
We are accomplices, though alone.
We are lovers, though alone.
We are brothers, though alone.
Alone, alone to face this journey.

Lost love makes indeed us stronger, but it leaves scars in our brain, and heart. Lightness, clearness, beauty, spontaneity, all is gone, and with fear only we do live, scared of collapsing at any moment. Lost love leaves behind an eroding dust that gets tears despite reasoned reasoning, wisdom, and lucidity.

It’s a sorcery, we are all victims of (…)
The sorcery must not be pandered.
It needs to be fought, or it will eat all of our dreams. (…)
Remember … My love … Always.

Nothing more, and more dignifying can be done, for a penitent, conscious mind, than a deadly wedding with poisonous flowers, and intentionally choose to get back into the small set of red curtains, and die.

50407335_2393778673983640_3650410279600128000_n

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.

IMG_20190123_145936_885.jpg