Pirandello's unfinished myth
with a final scene by Franco Scaldati
directed by Federico Tiezzi
with
Andrea Carabelli, Silvio Castiglioni, Roberto Corradino,
Marion D'Amburgo, Iaia Forte, Clara Galante,
Aleksandar Karlic, Sandro Lombardi, Ciro Masella,
Alessandro Schiavo, Massimo Verdastro, Debora Zuin
sets by Pier Paolo Bisleri
costumes by Giovanna Buzzi
lighting by Gianni Pollini
a production by Theatre of Rome - Sandro Lombardi Company- Metastasio Permanent Theatre of Tuscany
From Wednesday 11 to Sunday 22 March the Sandro Lombardi Company will be on stage at Mercadante Theatre with The Mountain Giants, unfinished myth of Pirandello with a final scene by Franco Scaldati, and directed by Federico Tiezzi. Protagonists of the performance are Iaia Forte in the role of Ilse and Sandro Lombardi as Cotrone.
What's the language that can defeat the standardization of the art? The screen, the stage or television? And what is the role of art in a society that has forgotten the classicism, the antiquity, the polis and, above all, the art of theatrical communication? These are the questions that The Mountain Giants asks to the public still today, offering again, by the staging of Federico Tiezzi, the magic of a classical meta- theatrical dialectics, unbelievably topical.
The director Federico Tiezzi plays with a Pirandello following the colours and visions of Fellini's 8½ and La dolce vita and those literary ones of Pasolini's Petrolio and Scritti corsari.
In a period where the society of the spectacle seems to want to progressively marginalize the role of the theatre - explains the director - it's for the purpose to insist on its centrality and cultural irreplaceableness that we refer to The Mountain Giants, that just to the theatre raises a longing and passionate loving hymn: a theatre that, with a prophetic intuition, Pirandello already saw threatened in its most intimate nature.
As is well known Pirandello could not finish his masterpiece: in the last part there's only a brief reconstruction written by his son. For this reason Federico Tiezzi has entrusted Franco Scaldati with the task to conceive a possible ending of the work, archetype through which it's possible to descend into the deepest meanders of the theatrical suggestions. The Sicilian dramatist uses for this purpose a language of soul, a theatrical idiom steeped in dialect but concrete and physical at the same time, by which to imagine an offstage where two witnesses narrate live what happens on stage. The Scaldati's work reinvents Pirandello, mixing the classic tone, that we all know, with the freshness and the modern tone of an absolute novelty.
The Mountain Giants is a work that seems a fable, an archaic drama that mixes elements of real life and otherwordly visions, so to induce the protagonists-actors to wonder where is the truth.
According to the Sandro Lombardi Company to stage this work today it means above all to link it to the contemporaneity, to the present society, and to the history of a mangled country like Sicily, to measure the distance that separates us from a work that is a classic by now, a not distant world but definitively lost.