Fabbrica europa
italiano english





by Harold Pinter
translation: Alessandra Serra
direction: Salvatore Tramacere
with Angela De Gaetano, Maria Rosaria Ponzetta,
Fabrizio Pugliese, Fabrizio Saccomanno
staging, lighting, sound: Lucio Diana,
Salvatore Tramacere
stage set-up: Mario Daniele




The Dumb Waiter
was written by Pinter in 1957. It is part of the author's first play-writing season, where nearly all his works are a metaphor on one single mechanism, that of violence: underground, almost impalpable violence, all the oppressive fury of which explodes in sudden outbursts.
Through the use of peripheral languages and stage inventions, we are confronted with a text well suited to our restless, spied-upon present, remotely-controlled to the extent of intimidating and threatening the individual.
The staging calls upon the audience to become voyeurs, accomplices in a space mechanism that guides and manipulates the spectator's vision. By means of technological solutions and particular perspective standpoints, the viewer's visual and sound perception involves him fully in the drama, the involuntary protagonist of what he is asked to watch: involved, and perhaps even culpable.
In the prologue, the stage is a metallic place, abstract, clean yet symbolically 'dirtied'; it is inhabited by two female figures, abstract doubles of the characters (Ben and Gus), who create an enigma of strength and fragility, cruelty and subtle comedy. The waiting, the boredom, the interrogative sequels become movement, a body dancing in a vortex from a musical thriller. 
Then they disappear, absorbed by the stage structure, and the audience also is invited to follow them, to cross space and find themselves elsewhere, to spy on another place, more realistic this time, yet this realism holds within it all the absurd in Pinter's text.
Two beds in a cupboard-like room, where Ben and Gus are awaiting orders for a criminal act. Encoded instructions float down from above, meaningless instructions. They wait, conversing in their dialect language. Ben's dialect is from Calabria, hard, basic, desperately searching for an order that can no way be found; Gus's dialect is from the Salente area of Puglia, stupefied, tormented, interrogatives sounding through the protracted vowels. They bide their time, in a wait full of words portraying the violence of a tense dialogue of outbursts, built on rhythms where silences count as much as speech.
Fifty years on, The Dumb Waiter continues to defy classification in any one theatrical genre, raising timeless queries that echo around the walls of a basement. Whose turn will it be tonight?



 





attachments
 press_LA NAZIONE

timetable
place start date time
Stazione Leopolda
(Spazio Alcatraz)
23/05/2008 18:00 € 12
€ 10 reduced
reservation required
Stazione Leopolda
(Spazio Alcatraz)
23/05/2008 21:00 € 12
€ 10 reduced
reservation required