L’Invenzione Dell’Amore
Translated from the Italian. Titles, names, venues and press headlines are kept as originally published.
L’INVENZIONE DELL’AMORE
(The Invention of Love)
versione italiana Ludovico Terzi
byTOM STOPPARD
with
MASSIMO DE FRANCOVICH AEH – Housman to età by 77 anni
e in ordine by apparizione
RICCARDO BINI Caronte – Chamberlain
LUCIANO ROMAN Housman
ALESSANDRO LOMBARDO Pollard
DAVIDE DALL’OSSO Moses Jackson
FLAVIO BONACCI Jowett
ANDREA GARINEI Pater
MICHELE DE MARCHI Oscar Wilde
installazione scenica
GIANNI CARLUCCIO
musica a cura by
PAOLO TERNI
directed by
PIERO MACCARINELLI
Written by Tom Stoppard in 1997, The Invention of Love is at present his most recent play. We are in Oxford in 1936. Alfred E. Housman is waiting for Charon, who is to accompany him on a last long journey. Almost the entire story unfolds at the water's edge, shifting between different narratives and different time frames.
Is it the protagonist's dream, or the delirium that precedes death?
We meet people who at various moments and in various situations were important in his life; we hear their voices as they quote the great Latin poets who invented love poetry; we see his teachers and colleagues, textual scholars and translators of Latin classics, university rectors and professors, writers and aesthetes, but also the young Housman and his inseparable friends Pollard and Moses Jackson – a teenage student, the object of a lifelong love, a platonic but also carnal love, a love never consummated, an invented love…
If, as Oscar Wilde writes, truth is a product of the imagination, then Alfred E. Housman's love for Jackson could also be the invention of love – or rather of the beloved. But it is precisely in the contrast between Oscar Wilde and Alfred E. Housman, between the poet and the scholar, that another key to this fascinating play lies: it sets the vital, creative despair of the poet against the shadowy sadness of the philologist and the scientist – the two souls, as it were, of Housman himself.
Perhaps only at the end of a life is it possible to draw up the balance, but each of us remains the sole judge of our own life.
While respecting the dramatic framework of the text, this study seeks to convey the main threads of the story. Through images and recorded words it aims to trace Alfred E. Housman's path towards an impossible search for the unity of himself, clearing the ground of all misunderstandings and false interpretations, of all settled beliefs and certainties born of error – even if through an impossible, heartbreaking encounter with his younger self.
Un incontro cruciale ma destinato a risultare, quando accade, ormai disperatamente inutile.
Piero Maccarinelli
Photographs are free of publication rights for press use. Please always credit the photographer.
Failed to get data. Error:
Request had insufficient authentication scopes.