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For more than forty years Monticchiello has been creating theatre which reflects on its situation as a
small village laden with history but threatened by marginalization and impoverishment on a human and cultural level. It did this by attempting to track down in its inheritance from the peasant world an
identity and a set of values which could be used for deciphering the present and imagining a reasonable future. However, for many years this theatrical reflection has taken place in a mood of
light-hearted serenity, in an almost metaphysical dimension removed from the more aggressive and even bloody contexts of the modern world. Modernity was celebrating its rituals on the other side of the
horizon composed by the Val d’Orcia hills: on this side it was possible just to hear the echo, as it were the rumble of a distant thunderstorm.Then this year, like a sudden avalanche, or a
devastating meteor, violent and peremptory, objective and brutal, there crashed on to Monticchiello the affair of the “new houses” — a massive unavoidable reality, just like the army of Charles V besieging
the castle in the sixteenth century, whose triumph brought an end to the town’s most glorious period. In these “houses”, a focus of scandal and symbol of division within the community, the hopes and
fears of the villagers suddenly found a concrete form: on the one hand there was the hope of a future which would be more prosperous, vital and concrete, divorced from aesthetic preoccupations which seemed
to belong more to a museum or a tombstone; on the other hand there was the massive intrusive impact of the buildings themselves, in a setting which is sensitive to say the least. After the controversy
exploded in the media, the community immediately seemed wounded and torn apart: nothing so “auto-dramatic” had happened during Monticchiello’s past forty years, so it seemed an inevitable subject-matter for
the 2007 play. But the decision to explore it was not easy, nor automatic, nor painless. People’s minds were inflamed, the village was split, the conflict between opposing points of view was
incurable. To metabolize this issue of “the houses” and turn it into the subject of a play was a difficult, painful and disturbing operation. But gradually the miracle was achieved, and this
year’s show — the title is an exclamatory A(h)ia! — began to take on the nature of a cathartic event, the expression of a grief, a necessary step forward towards some later form of enriched perception.
The concept soon took its shape. The core of the plot develops within the framework of a farce, chosen from the classic theatrical repertoire — escapist on the surface, but able to
develop more pressing messages. The whole thing is intermingled with ironic and visionary excursions, with surreal metaphors which hint at the bewilderment and anxiety of the whole community. In
a stage space marked out by a “chalk circle” the actor-villagers appear like living monoliths planted in the ground, unable to move any part of their bodies except those which happen to be left outside the
circle. What all of then can do, however, is speak. Their words show them living out this situation as a result of bonds forged in defence of their territory. Their statements are
interwoven with anger, pain, rancour, and irony. They remember their former dreams, nurtured and proclaimed throughout forty years of theatre: the chalk circle repopulated and projected into new life;
the village restored to its ancient splendour. Within this context is set a re-evocation of a slice of peasant life: the eviction of the Bugno family, a real episode from the 1950s, a painful
epic moment in the political struggles of the sharecropping class, which brings forcefully back on to the stage the special link which the Teatro Povero has with the peasant world which is the root of its
local identity and local consciousness, root of the expressive authenticity of its theatre, and now threatened with being truly evicted from the communal memory as people were evicted from their houses all
that time ago. Then once again the story on stage goes back to the framework of the opening farce. The personality whose joyful prestigious presence was supposed to raise the tone of a
wedding feast turns out to be a mystifying trickster, who blots out the mood of hope and happiness in a nightmare which upsets and terrifies the guests. Fiction and reality mingle once again on stage,
the suspicion begins to circulate that the theatrical fable actually reflects the village’s reality. Dreams, utopias and paradoxes which have been nurtured through so many years of theatre are no
longer just a provocative fantasy; they are real entities present here and now, — uncomfortable, powerful, strongly built, ready to shape and define the future .... Meanwhile, in the
background, imperturbably, silently, frantically, seemingly unstoppably, in a festive but threatening crescendo, the construction cranes loose themselves into their endless dance . |
