Giacomo, il Prepotente

Giacomo, il prepotente

byGiuseppe Manfridi

with in ordine by apparizione:

Massimo De Rossi Giacomo Leopardi

Maurizio Donadoni Antonio Ranieri

Fulvia Carotenuto Paolina Ranieri

Antonella Schirò Lucella

Elisabetta Pozzi Paolina Leopardi

set designFranco Autiero

costumesAnnalisa Giacci

original musicCarlo De Nonno

production managerMelina Balsamo

Director of photography Eraldo Fava

direttore by produzione Guido Balzola

ottimizzazione Cristina Gerardo

directed by teatrale e televisiva Piero Maccarinelli

staged in collaboration with RAI 2 for the bicentenary of the birth of Giacomo Leopardi

Broadcast on 09/06/1998 on Raidue Palcoscenico

Giacomo, il prepotente tells, in three acts, of the last days of Giacomo Leopardi as if spied through three keyholes: each act is set in a different bedroom. Giuseppe Manfridi, a leading writer of Italy's new literary-theatrical wave, in his Giacomo, il prepotente – directed by Piero Maccarinelli – evokes three of Leopardi's bedrooms, in Torre del Greco, Recanati and Naples. He shows us three bedrooms in the form of three lazarettos, in a three-act play that cares nothing for privacy and does not fear the scandal of dirty linen, putting its finger on the wounds of a Leopardi now close to wasting away and dying. Ranieri's room in the country in the first act; Leopardi's room in Recanati in the second, where the poet is absent but his sister Paolina gathers things for him to entrust to one of Ranieri's servants; and finally the Neapolitan room where Giacomo dies. The first is at Villa Ferrigni, in Torre del Greco, where the poet, already very ill, was taken by his friend Ranieri to escape the miasma of the cholera raging in Naples. The pretext that forces the two into dialogue, pushing them to the edge of the most delicate intimacies, is Giacomo's stubborn refusal to get into a tub of warm water. In the first act Leopardi refuses the bath prepared for him, resisting with skill and coquetry Ranieri's affectionate but also physical pressure; in the second Paolina confesses her feelings as a sister, a spinster and a neurotic woman with torrential immodesty; in the third Giacomo's agony is softened, but also made more painful, by a declaration of love from the family maid. What one truly reads in this play is a series of variations on the theme of normality and love, or their absence. And precisely as an exercise in the morphology of feeling, the play is modern and effective. Much of this effectiveness, however, rests on the work of the actors, on their ability to make credible fragments of life and rather extreme relationships. Manfridi has tried to give each character a language of their own: flights of fancy and asthmatic ravings, gruff accents, archaic and unwanted jargon, illiterate vernacular, the Neapolitan syntax of a good family. Only one expression is common to all: the longing for love that seizes human beings, which the characters show in opposite ways, always exorcising Giacomo Leopardi's sad end. Manfridi does not have his Giacomo recite poems, nor discuss aesthetic or philosophical theories, nor even talk much about his life, apart from a few references to his father and Paolina. In short, he could be any very sick, very fascinating and very strange man – as people of genius often are. Articles