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UGO PAGLIAI - MANUELA KUSTERMANN
In suspended time, in the half-light of an old stage, Henrik Vogler, a great director and theater director, is sitting in an armchair, motionless. He appears almost stuffed. He is 109 years old or perhaps only 62. The stage is cluttered with stage equipment, wings, props, left over from an afternoon rehearsal of Strindberg's The Dream. Now, however, the director is left alone. The building is completely deserted. The curtain is up until to halfway through. Suddenly Anna Egerman, a young actress playing Indra's Daughter in the play directed from Vogler, appears on the scene. from this moment begins a close confrontation between the two who, suspended in a border zone, finally allow themselves to speak the truth. It is almost a ray of light in a dark room from years, a moment of reality in an existence of fiction. The sudden entrance of Rakel, introduces other Bergmanian themes of extraordinary poignancy: the perception of time, the fear of old age, the extraordinary fragility of the female soul. Rakel's is a figure who walks a tightrope, an artist destroyed by her own talent, a flayed alive. In After the Rehearsal Bergman does not even create "characters" anymore, but languages, emotional functions, "containers" of frailties, anxieties and fears, real women and men who can no longer to live with the lies, with the compromises of bourgeois life, old-children who risk their lives, lose their balance and fall to to the ground in the grip of an obsessive need for truth, for a possible meaning, for a sign, a gesture that gives meaning to their little lives. The theater in the end, will forever remain that poor island suspended on the edge of the horizon, a place more real than the real, the last refuge untouched by the complexity of daily life, the arrogance of politics, the arrogance of court intellectuals, the buying and selling of public offices, governed solely by dream and illusion, a small theater in closure, suspended in nothingness, over the abyss.
by **Ingmar Bergman
with Ugo Pagliai, Manuela Kustermann
and with** Arianna Di Stefano**
scenes Alessandro Chiti
costumes Daniele Gelsi
original music Marco Podda
lighting design Umile Vainieri
directed by Daniele Salvo
Production Centro di Produzione Teatrale La Fabbrica dell'Attore - Teatro Vascello (Rome), Milleluci Entertainment
She made her debut at a very young age playing Ophelia in Carmelo Bene´s Hamleto_. In 1967 she began a long association with Giancarlo Nanni and founded the Teatro la Fede, the first permanent home of the Space Re(v)action Group where the "Roman School" was born. Together to Nanni creates significant shows and historical productions: to such as Alice from Carroll, Ribemont-Dessaignes´s The Emperor of China , Wedekind´s Spring Awakening, a show that will consecrate her as a "diva" of the avant-garde. In the 1970s, the "Duse of the Off Cellars" is on the most important Italian stages in Schiller´s I masnadieri,_ Franziska_ by Wedekind, Shakespeare´s Cimbelino, Ibsen´s Casa di Bambola always directed by Giancarlo Nanni. In Hamlet_ Kustermann scandalizes by dressing as the Danish prince and is a great success. With Adriana Asti she plays Jean Genet´s Le serve, directed by Mario Missiroli. For his performance in Herodias by Rocco Familiari, directed by Nanni, he obtained in 1991 the prestigious award of the Maschera with golden laurel from the Italian Drama Institute. In 1999 she again played the part of Alice in the new production of to as Alice, then Irina Arkadina in Checov´s The Seagull, performed, in a long national and international tour, also at the CAFELAMAMA Theater in New York, to Moscow, Istanbul, Cairo, Tokyo.
This was followed by Shakespeare's As You Like It,_ Loretta Strong _by Copi, _Puss in Boots _by Tieck, _The War _by Goldoni, _The Cherry Orchard _by Chekhov and many, many other plays. With Giancarlo Nanni she founded Il Vascello Theatre in 1989, which they directed together until the director's untimely death; subsequently Manuela Kustermann was artistic director of La Fabbrica dell'Attore and Teatro Vascello.
He approached theater at a very young age and after graduating from the Silvio d'Amico National Academy of Dramatic Art he joined to the Randone Fortunato company and soon after the Compagnia I Nuovi, directed from Guglielmo Morandi for television. In that context he acted in_ Ma non è una cosa seria_ by Luigi Pirandello, Il cane dell'ortolano by Lope De Vega, Addio giovinezza! by Sandro Camasio and Nino Oxilia_, Adorabile mascalzone_ by Griboedov, La scarf and the series entitled Vivere insieme. to mid-1960s at the Stabile di Genova, directed from Luigi Squarzina, he participated to _Ciascuno to suo modo _by Pirandello and Corte Savella by Anna Banti. to Beginning in the 1970s his artistic activity was divided between theater and television, in fact while he was enjoying success on television with the screenplays Il segno del comando, La Baronessa di Carini, Dimenticare Lisa, he was present on stage with many Pirandello texts including: Trovarsi, Liolà, Il piacere dell'onestà, L'uomo la bestia e la virtù, Il giuoco delle parti, always directed from directors of the caliber of De Lullo, Squarzina, Castri, Sciaccaluga. He has received various awards including the Flaiano Prize, the Mask for Theater as the lead actor in Waiting for Godot and the Golden Aeschylus to Siracusa for the interpretation of Tiresias in Oedipus Rex directed from Daniele Salvo.