|
Theatre, like life, is a painstaking and slightly absurd process of construction and
deconstruction, of assembling and dismantling scenes and experiences.
Our play opens in this sort of symbolic setting, with young people wandering round and rummaging among curiosities left over from
the past; and on stage with them is a silent woman, motionless and enigmatic, jealously guarding a small suitcase beside her.
All of a sudden, a hint of a sound and a flash of memories suck her into the
limelight, and give her some life and solidity. Her personal history bursts on to the stage. It consists of bleak painful facts from her life-story: the bewildering feelings of a young child, the
harshness of existence; and, projected at a greater distance, her role as an actress, as a performer of herself in the wider context of her people. They in their turn decide at a certain point to
narrate their own hopes and sufferings, their moments of pride and moments of fear, wars and poverty, enthusiasms and disappointments, switching between past history and present anxieties — the light, the
shadow, and in the end the twilight of peasant civilization. The epic world, in fact, which has always fed the Poor Theatre of Monticchiello and made it possible.
Forty years…. A life…. But with what sort of future?
This is the question which threads itself through the conclusion of the play, through all the festive celebrations; the question to which
there is no answer. Even within these walls, the future, as always, does not allow us to scratch beneath its surface.
There exists only, away in a corner, often overlooked, the unpretentious
little suitcase from the opening scene. The box where we all hide our own sorrows and our own treasures; the box which once long ago we were lucky enough, and rash enough, to open.
After so many years, we are not yet sorry that we did. |
