WINSTON vs CHURCHILL

GIUSEPPE BATTISTON

in

WINSTON vs CHURCHILL, from “Churchill, il vizio della democrazia” by CARLO G. GABARDINI

and with
LUCIENNE PERRECA

set design

NICOLAS BOVEY

costumes

URSULA PATZAK

lighting design

ANDREA VIOLATO

suono e musica

ANGELO LONGO

production photos

NOEMI ARDESI

directed by
PAOLA ROTA

Lo spettacolo ha debuttato to Teatro Dante Alighieri by Ravenna on 10 January 2019.

Can one man alone change the world? A man made like everyone else, with a body like everyone else's, whose days have the same number of hours as everyone else's? What makes him capable of changing the course of history, of intervening in the flow of events and altering them? What allows him not to get bogged down in the mighty machinery of power and politics, not to succumb to its gears? The ability to read reality? The context? Courage? Intellectual strength? These questions guide our interest in a man who was certainly no ordinary man – a man, a politician who is an icon, almost a mask: in some ways Winston Churchill is the twentieth century, he is Europe; perhaps he is the one who, thanks to his political choices, saved humanity from self-destruction during the warlike thirty years from 1915 to 1945. Churchill embodies the primacy of politics, and as a human being he is excess in everything: he gulps whisky, shouts, rants and complains, but never gives up; he smokes cigars non-stop, coughs, dictates aloud while drinking champagne, falls ill, commands but listens, is resolute but admires those able to change their minds, often works lying in bed, knows the world but also the problems of individuals, has trenchant attitudes and expressions, and quips that sound like tweets: “The Italians lose wars as if they were football matches, and football matches as if they were wars.”

Giuseppe Battiston meets the figure of Churchill, brings him to the stage, reinvents him and explores the mystery of the man through the magic of theatre, without ever losing a powerful sense of irony: “Better to make the news than to receive it; better to be an actor than a critic.”

All this is the subject of Carlo G. Gabardini's text, which shows Churchill in a dreamlike present in which his whole existence coexists, and ends up speaking to us and about us today with disarming precision.

Articoli

Il Giorno

la Repubblica – Milano

la Repubblica – Torino

Corriere Romagna

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