WS TEMPEST
with Chiara Elisa Rossini, Diana Ferrantini, Alessio Papa, Boris Ventura, Marina Carluccio, Katia Raguso, Alessandro Sanmartin
scenic elements Luigi Troncon
music and direction Massimo Munaro
a production Teatro del Lemming 2016
At the theater actor and spectator
try and try again the date with the catastrophe: the death.
They get used to it, they practice to think it.
We're at theater, it's all fake. We're at theater, it's all true.
With this work we complete our Shakespearean series, called the Water Trilogy, started with Hamlet and continued with Juliet and Romeo - letters from the liquid world. These works propose a reflection on the eternally present conflict between individual and power. In the Shakespearean The tempest, Prospero, unjustly dispossessed and forced into exile, realizes his revenge that does not lead to violence but, for ones, to reconciliation and forgiveness. It seems that the perpetuation of violence finds an end. These performances are not a faithful reproduction of the texts and of shakespearian words, from which we think theatre should free itself, but they are faithful to the archetypal nuclei that reverberate from them in a still scary manner.
In particular we have seen in The Tempest the story of a shipwreck that takes place, first of all, in the protagonist’s mind. It is as if Shakespeare himself, in the figure of Prospero, from the bottom of the sea, recalls the infinite characters of his works: Hamlet, Juliet, Macbeth, Lear, Richard, Brutus come back to visit him. These figures represent, at the same time, also parts of a composite identity that is the one of the poet, that is the one of everyone. The shipwreck in the memory of Prospero / WS is also a shipwreck in our mind.
The performances of this trilogy are also metatheatrical reflections. They develop three possible researches on the meaning and the manner of doing theatre nowadays. What is theatre useful for? Is it a simple entertainment space or can it still be an effective tool to trap the king's conscience? These works invite to take part, to take sides. Because theatre can still represent a radical experience, founds itself, as it happens in WS Tempest, on a new notion of space, using all the possible plans and all the degrees of perspective. Moreover, theatre can think about the spectator as a constitutive part of his dramaturgy: here the spectators, as already in Shakespeare, are co-authors of the drama. It’s so for their living and active presence, because their duty is to weave the logos through the thread of their experience.
