Decamerone

STEFANO ACCORSI

in

DECAMERONE vizi, virtù, passioni
liberamente tratto from Decamerone byGiovanni Boccaccio

and with

SALVATORE ARENA

SILVIA BRIOZZO

FONTE FANTASIA

MARIANO NIEDDU

NAIKE SILIPO

dramaturgy

MARIA MAGLIETTA

sets and costumes

CARLO SALA

lighting design

LUCA BARBATI

assistente scene e costumi

ROBERTA MONOPOLI  

Assistant director

MARIA MAGLIETTA

adattamento teatrale e directed by

MARCO BALIANI

The show premiered at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence on 9 December 2014. On stage stands a covered wagon, the travelling 'home' and theatre of the company about to perform the play. The wagon's modular design allows seven tales from the Decameron to be staged, creating each time the spaces and atmospheres the stories need.

The company is driven by great passion, but its material resources are far less great, so the actors take turns in a succession of roles and stories, relying on their theatrical craft.

Director's notes

Stories serve to make the world less terrible, to imagine other lives, different from the one we are struggling to live.

Stories serve to keep the breath of death at bay, for a little while.

As long as we tell stories, as long as there is a voice narrating, we are still alive – the one who tells and we who listen.

This is why in the Decameron the company leaves Florence for the hills and there begins to tell stories. The city is plague-ridden; stories are needed to make people forget – stories of love, erotic and furious, grotesque and frightening stories, as long as they are stories and well told, because out there death is drawing near with sharpened teeth, hungry for its prey.

We chose to tell some of the tales from Boccaccio's Decameron because today it is our civic life that is plague-ridden.

We sense the deadly miasma: corruption, pollution, mafias, the shamelessness and impudence of the powerful, lies, the exploitation of the weakest, wrongdoing.

In this gradual loss of civic feeling, it seemed important to us to let Boccaccio's voice resound through our voices as theatre people.

To remind ourselves that we possess linguistic treasures equal to our landscapes and natural treasures – another Italy, one that never appears in the daily bulletins of defeat with which the plague dispirits us.

To tell ourselves stories that make us more open to the possibility of other lives, outside this reality show in which we find ourselves acting as contestants in a global Big Brother.

Because even if the stories seem comic – those vulgar affairs, those cheeky inventions that provoke laughter and mockery – underneath they reveal the mystery of life itself, or that clear-eyed bitterness that suddenly awakens the conscience. We might thus discover that the emperor has no clothes, and that to free ourselves from the plague we must start from our own frailties and weaknesses, recognise them and laugh at them, perhaps through gritted teeth.

Marco Baliani

THE COMPANY 

STEFANO ACCORSI – PANFILO – Mastro di Brigata

SALVATORE ARENA – FILOSTRATO – Il fedele

SILVIA BRIOZZO – ELISSA – La generosa

FONTE FANTASIA – PAMPINEA – La giovine

MARIANO NIEDDU – DIONEO – Lo scaltro

NAIKE SILIPO – FIAMMETTA – L’innamorata

(Each of them plays several roles.) Photographs are free of publication rights for press use. Please always credit the photographer: ph. Filippo Manzini, Andrea Pirrello

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