Questi Fantasmi!

SILVIO ORLANDO

in

QUESTI FANTASMI!

byEDUARDO DE FILIPPO

Le anime                                                            interpreti

Pasquale Lojacono, anima in pena             Silvio Orlando

Maria, his wife, a lost soul – Maria Laura Rondinini

Alfredo Marigliano, anima irrequieta          Francesco Procopio

Armida, his wife, a sad soul – Daniela Marazita

Silvia, her daughter, an innocent soul – Francesca Ponzio

Arturo, her son, an innocent soul – Mariano Giamè

Raffaele, portiere, anima nera                   Tonino Taiuti

Carmela, his sister, a damned soul – Mimma Lovoi

Gastone Califano, anima libera                    Lello Radice

Saverio Califano, anima inutile                     Carlo Di Maio

Maddalena, his wife, a useless soul – Cinzia Virguti

I° facchino, anima condannata                    Carlo Di Maio

2° facchino, anima condannata                   Sandro Amatucci

Prof. Santanna, a useful soul (but he never appears)

sets and costumes

BRUNO BUONINCONTRI

music

PASQUALE SCIALO’

lighting design

CESARE ACCETTA

production photos

ORESTE LANZETTA

directed by

ARMANDO PUGLIESE

The show premiered on 16 October 2004 at the Teatro D'Annunzio in Latina

Director's notes

Questi fantasmi!, uno dei più famosi testi by Eduardo, etc.,etc.

Mi viene da pensare:

I had the pleasure of staging this play for Luca De Filippo and his company some years ago and, if memory serves, the production went very well.

Naturally I hope this production, with Silvio Orlando in the lead, goes equally well.

Molto mi concentrai sulla casa degli spiriti a quel tempo, e sul rapporto dei personaggi with quella casa molto mi concentrai sulle influenze scarpettiane e su quelle pirandelliane nella stesura eduardiana by uno dei suoi primi capolavori del dopoguerra, eppure…

And yet something must surely have been missing, perhaps because my theatrical or human experience was not yet substantial enough.

Certainly the game poised between appearance and reality, between fiction and truth, that runs through the whole work is what I tried to bring out, but the scales perhaps tipped a little too far towards the naivety of our Pasquale Lojacono.

Today I ask myself: did I properly underline the whole distinction between the 'fool' and the 'clever one' so dear to my fellow Neapolitans – a distinction that almost always overlooks the possibility that beyond those two conditions there might be a third, intelligence? And will I manage today to make it clear that our protagonist is essentially made of this stuff, because that is how the author wanted him, with his despair and his elation, in a game in which he stakes the very value of his existence?

We hope so, just as we hope at least to suggest that beyond the game of ghosts, beyond the interests, appetites and needs of our male characters, the author clearly – if in different forms – makes the women's the true drama.

That of Maria, a restless woman tossed between opposing feelings, who, when she finally glimpses salvation, sees it vanish under her nose.

That of Carmela, the porter's sister, who lost her wits… after going up to the roof terrace – perhaps because of a joke in dubious taste by our neighbour across the way, Professor Santanna.

That of Armida, the betrayed wife, abandoned by her husband in a remote countryside to look after the two 'sickly ones', as she herself calls her two children…

…and even that of the porter's late wife, who perhaps lost her life precisely because of the 'loving' slaps the man had grown used to giving her to tame her or to 'make her talk'.

Yes, because beyond the incredible comic inventions and the paradoxical, grotesque situations, it is drama we are talking about, with all its bitter implications – including that “…it's likely… let's hope” that closes it, a harbinger of further dramas to come…

Armando Pugliese

La scenografia

Changing perspectives, shifting viewpoints, moving spaces, changing paths. Like a Steadicam I follow the story as it unfolds through an alternation of full and empty spaces; I try to hand movement over to the audience and lead them to explore a space that would otherwise be still and would monotonously always show the same face. I look for a living, dynamic naturalism made of sensations and dreamt truths. I want to give the illusion that beyond the stage another space lives, and yet another. I cross the boundaries of the unseen to convey the sense that something exists even beyond our own imagination. Who knows – perhaps it is the protagonist's own state of mind, perhaps a 'point-of-view shot' that sees the flat through his own eyes, open to the possible and the impossible.

Bruno Buonincontri

Le musiche

Presenze reali e immaginarie si agitano tra le stanze by un antico palazzo napoletano.

As in a tragicomic existential waltz, one may also come across the immaterial presence of noises, sounds and music: now burlesque, almost underlining the gap between fiction and reality; now heartbreaking, to capture the double face of hardship – the economic one, and that of one's own precarious private life.

So these ghosts sometimes make themselves heard!

Pasquale Scialò

L’inquilino del trentaseiesimo piano. (trentaseiesimo giorno by prove)

In my dressing room two bulbs out of six work; the main light doesn't. There is a curtain that just won't close: anyone passing in the street now could see me in my underpants, but no one has passed for quite a while… and I am happy!

Yes, really happy – not something like it, but the happiness of serenity, electricity, awareness, the desire to go on stage.

Rehearsals are a wonderful, exhausting creative process, but they are also a trial – a proper trial. Never more so than in our case: every character was put in the dock. Armando Pugliese was the prosecutor, we actors the defence lawyers. Armando, an incorruptible anarchist-libertarian-reactionary, saw into the darkest, most unspeakable, sordid folds with apocalyptic fury: the stronger the light, the longer the rotten shadow it cast.

I too, a wicked do-gooder, found myself defending him, this poor scoundrel Pasquale Lojacono. And indeed, in the perverse mechanism built by Eduardo, everything seems simple, linear, even disarming: he loves his tenant, who has left the mezzanine floors only slightly brighter than the depths to which he feels drawn, down, ever further down, dizzyingly.

Tutto troppo semplice, troppo lineare “troppo” appunto.

Pasquale Lojacono is above all a mystery grappling with a mystery greater than his own. Grappling with a life that hurts you and mocks you too. Grappling with the fear of not making it, of being left alone, of not being able to hold together the shreds of this cracked, sterile couple (another very modern element: the absence of children, perhaps accidental – but in theatre, as we know, there is no such thing as chance). I believe Eduardo loves his mettle, his ability to endure without ever looking away, standing there heroically, without running away. The South, someone said, is a paradise inhabited by devils: harmony here is a harder, more painful conquest than elsewhere. One of Lojacono's fatal mistakes is to think it can be reached by accumulating goods, nice things. And this, in my view, is the most dazzling insight of Eduardo's masterpiece: that what would ruin us would not be hunger, so devastating when the play was written, but the hunger without appetite that would soon devastate our minds and make us so unhappy without knowing why.

P.S. Three thank-yous to close: the first to Luca, who gave me the joy I spoke of at the beginning. The second to Armando, who gave me back the sense of the actor-director relationship I had been missing for a while. The third to Carlo, Daniela, Francesca, Francesco, Lello, Maria Laura, Mimma, Sandro, Mariano, Gianfranco, Francesca, Cinzia, Tommaso and to my friend and old companion Taiuti, who gave me back, intact, the freshness, curiosity and passion of the early years we spent together in the theatre and beyond.

Silvio Orlando. Articles. Photographs are free of publication rights for press use. Please always credit the photographer: ph. Oreste Lanzetta

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