Molière

Nuovo Teatro diretta da Marco Balsamo

presents

ALESSIO BONI     

in

MOLIÈRE – The Art of Mockery

text di FRANCESCO NICCOLINI

liberamente ispirato da
Vita del Signor Molière di Michail Bulgakov

dramaturgy di Roberto Aldorasi, Alessio Boni, Francesco Niccolini andMarcello Prayer

cast in via by definizione

AVAILABLE FROM JANUARY 2027. He was destined to become an upholsterer like his father, but his grandfather always took him to see the Italian street comedians, and as soon as he was old enough he took to the stage. He set off with a travelling company and spent fifteen years touring France: besides acting he became an author – first of disastrous tragedies that landed him in prison for debt, then of hilarious and brilliant farces – and, since nobody wrote them as he did, his fame brought him back to Paris to perform for Louis XIV, the Sun King. From then on he was the man of the theatre most loved by the King and the Parisian public, but also the most hated by all the other actors. And not only them: social-climbing courtiers, bigoted academics, profiteering doctors, hypocritical men of faith, nouveau-riche merchants, betrayed husbands, over-fashionable women, salon intellectuals and many others swore revenge, because he made them ridiculous on stage and made all Paris laugh, castigating with them the endless range of human vices. Someone has written that his theatre turned the craftsmen and shopkeepers of Paris into the people who, a century later, made Europe's first Revolution. He certainly revolutionised theatre: play after play his characters became real – no longer masks, but living women and men; with him the stage became a mirror of reality, the privileged place to look inside oneself and others, and to laugh at everything, even the painful wounds the modern age was already opening in people's consciences – always with an inexhaustible comic vein, always stopping his creative madness at the gates of tragedy. His enemies became too many, censorship gave him no peace, the King's tastes began to change and the people he loved most began to betray him, but he never stopped fighting like a lion for his theatre and his company, writing his most celebrated masterpieces. Just as his life seems straight out of a novel, so does his death: he died on stage, where he had lived, amid the audience's laughter and his actors' disbelief. After the secret funeral reserved for actors who would not renounce their profession, when a hundred years later the new republican France looked for his grave to move his body to a mausoleum dedicated to the nation's most illustrious genius, they could not find him. Enough to believe that he is only an imaginary dead man and that, alive and as modern as his theatre, he continues his tour through the theatres of the world, inspiring the great hits of every age.

Signore e signori, ecco a voi Molière!