La Notte delle Lucciole

LA NOTTE DELLE LUCCIOLE

byRoberto Andò and Marco Baliani

testi by Leonardo Sciascia

with

MARCO BALIANI

and

COCO LEONARDI

in ordine alfabetico

Martorano Andrea

Nesi Umberto

Panico Felice

Pizzuti Armando

Vella Alexandre

sets and costumes

GIANNI CARLUCCIO

music

MARCO BETTA

production photos

LIA PASQUALINO

drammaturgia e directed by

ROBERTO ANDÒ

Lo spettacolo ha debuttato to Teatro Franco Parenti by Milano on 02 February 2008.Director's notes

I thought that bringing Leonardo Sciascia's words back to the stage today made sense. That it had a reason, both poetic and political – without any ambiguity in the relation between the two, as always, at all times, but even more so today. I believe we must start again from conscience, and from those who in the name of conscience spent their lives for freedom – to affirm its purest dimension, the one that accepts no compromises or bargains – so that Italy may find its lost gods again. In this vigil his words and those of Pasolini (there is not a single word that is not theirs, apart from two quotations from Pirandello and Canetti) find a meeting point that I believe is not arbitrary. A meeting in which both fulfil the destiny of representing, in their writing and in bearing witness to their time, “a race that makes its gentleness a weapon that does not forgive”. Both ready, pen in hand – as if it were a sword – for action, to produce concrete effects through writing, to disarm power. Retracing their exemplary lives, exemplarily devoted to the mandate that made them prophets – in literature – of that special civic dimension that has rarely found admirers in Italy, I imagined, on a night of vigil, Sciascia in dialogue at a distance with Pasolini. Fraternally, desperately. About death, against death. Pasolini's own, Moro's. That of the fireflies. Sciascia is often described as a man of the Enlightenment. I believe he was always – and even more so as he approached death – religiously drawn to the unfathomable mysteries of existence, and for this reason gave reason no alibis. I imagined and composed this text for a great actor, Marco Baliani.

                                                                                                                     Roberto Andò

 ****

Roberto Andò's one-act play is set on a special night lit by fireflies and by the words of two great writers of our time. Once again, through theatre – as he has done in the past through cinema – Andò questions Sicily and one of its most emblematic witnesses, Leonardo Sciascia, played here by one of the leading figures of narrative theatre, Marco Baliani.

A national premiere, following a study in Palermo, to bring to the stage two writers of action and truth, Sciascia and Pasolini – two figures of word and thought who, through an imaginary friendly dialogue at a distance, become messengers of a clear-sighted investigation. The space is a schoolroom, a memory of the years when Sciascia was a primary school teacher in Racalmuto, the experience that gave rise to his first novel, Le parrocchie di Regalpetra. A space that, through word and action, takes on in turn the painful, hallucinated look of the sulphur mine, or of Parliament, or the ghostly darkness of a place torn by flashes of thought steeped in sorrow but relentless in its reasoning on behalf of humanity. In this shape-shifting classroom, besides the narrator – Baliani – an old man and six children play the eternal, unchanging game of executioner and victim, servant and master, innocence and madness. But it is Sciascia, through a first-person account, through the word of a witness, who sets in motion, in the form of a vigil, this fugue on Pasolini (seen as a brother), giving his words the character of an ultimate reflection on death, and on writing as an inexorable challenge to the power and prestige of death, formulating the clearest expression of commitment, in a secular sense. Political theatre, where words serve to flush out hidden thoughts and lies, without giving up the (Pirandellian) question of the mystery of existence. Articles: La Stampa

Il Sole 24 Ore

Avvenire

Corriere della Sera – Roma

Delteatro.it

Liberazione

la Repubblica

Photographs are free of publication rights for press use. Please always credit the photographer: ph. Lia Pasqualino

DOWNLOAD THE PHOTOS

  Failed to get data. Error:
Request had insufficient authentication scopes.