The participation of the Teatro Stabile dell´Umbria to Spoleto 52 Festival dei Due Mondi stems from the ideal bond that unites the two institutions, from always devoted to the support and promotion of the performing arts: with this spirit, the Stabile dell´Umbria presents the premiere at the fifty-second Spoleto Festival of Aristophanes´ Le Nuvole , directed by Antonio Latella.

In 423 to. C., when The Clouds is first staged, Aristophanes (presumably 450 - 388 to.C.) is an already established young playwright who seizes with the new opera, perhaps, his most important success. Even today The Clouds is the most performed ancient comedy, along with to The Birds, to Lysistrata and to The Frogs, belonging to the playwright's maturity.
His debut had occurred, more or less, four years earlier, when Athens, exhausted from a violent plague epidemic, was already in the midst of the Peloponnesian War. His first two comedies have not come down to us, but we know their subject matter, and we know that, from his beginnings, Aristophanes cast contemporary reality in the comic genre, and, more than once, public figures of the time acted in his theater, made the subject of aggressive and pragmatic satire by the playwright. The young Aristophanes lived his present as a decadence of the Golden Age of Athens and challenged both the politics of supremacy at any cost and philosophy and poetry that had moved away from tradition and sought new methods and new language. Socrates, his contemporary, though almost twenty years older, is the central character in The Clouds, portrayed as a funny old man who nevertheless speaks from sophist and is a master of intellectual dishonesty. The unintentional prominence of Socrates in this play has from always aroused curiosity and amusement in readers and spectators.

"THE CLOUDS are everything and they are nothing, they are our desires and our fears, our joys and our horrors, and they become everything we want but can never be. Yet in that extreme act made by man (destruction for survival) the only thing that will be saved are THE CLOUDS that never were and never existed, so they are indestructible, like thoughts, THE IDEAS [...]

The Game of Theater multiplies in this human comedy, the gate of knowledge has become tiny, crossing it is challenging but it is behind to that red velvet gate that one learns the tricks of fiction, to bluffing about the truth or to knowing how to recognize it [...]

This ancient play does not enact a character but the ICON of a PERSONAGE, who has the name SOCRATES and the place that houses him, THE THINKERY, is the real character with whom Strepsiades must confront: a place not a place, a space that has doors from cross but has no walls, a room where the Master can suspend himself in the air, far from the banality of gravity; only in this way can he think, reflect, create, prepare just and unjust speeches, a place where the elusive becomes form but remains incomprehensible because of its ever-changing essence. The Thinker, a character who is neither male nor female, cannot be, as Aristophanes ironically makes to Socrates say, neither chicken nor fowl. [...]".
Antonio Latella

Antonio Latella
was born to Castellammare di Stabia in 1967. After attending the school of the Teatro Stabile in Turin directed from Franco Passatore and the school of La Bottega Teatrale in Florence directed from Vittorio Gassman, he began his theatrical profession as an actor. From 1986 to 2000, he worked with, among others: Pagliaro, Di Marca, Ronconi, Gassman, Castri, De Capitani, Syxty, Bruni, Piscitelli. Between 1997 and 1998, he stages his first shows as a director. In 1999, with Othello, he tackled Shakespeare's theater for the first time; to this was followed by stagings of: Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet. In 2001 he won the special Ubu prize for the project "Shakespeare and Beyond." He returns to Shakespeare, a first time in 2001, with a study of Richard III, then, during 2003, he stages Twelfth Night, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew. At the same time, from 2001 to 2004, he also devotes himself to to Genet (Close Surveillance, The Negroes, Querelle) and to Pasolini ( Pilade, Porcile, Beast from style). In spring 2004, he was at the Lyon Opéra with Monteverdi's Orfeo, his first opera direction, which was followed, in the fall of the same year, by directing Gluck's Orfeo e Euridice at the Piccinni in Bari and, in July 2005, directing Puccini's Tosca at the Sferisterio in Macerata. In 2004, he received the Vittorio Gassman Award as best artist of the year. In November of the same year, with Edward II, he tackled Christopher Marlowe's theater for the first time. to October 2005, he brought to the stage a philosophical text by Giordano Bruno that had never been performed before, La cena de le ceneri, awarded by the National Association of Theater Critics: "Show of the Year," in September 2006. In June 2006, at the Festival delle Colline Torinesi, to conclusion of an intense experimental work begun in the winter of 2004 to Berlin, Latella presented to Italian audiences the Studio su Medea, a tale in three chapters of the Medea myth. UBU Prize 2008, as the best performance of the year. During the summer of 2006, he led the Atelier on Pericles, as part of the third edition of the Thierry Salmon Project, directed from Franco Quadri for the Ecole des Maîtres. The work of the Atelier resulted in the play Pericles, from William Shakespeare, which Latella adapted and directed, presented as "Creation of the Project Thierry Salmon - the new Ecole des Maîtres 2006 - 2007 directed from Franco Quadri," which premiered in July 2007 at the Venice Biennale Theatre Festival - 39. In the 2006 - 2007 Theatre Season, he staged Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, with Laura Marinoni in the lead role and some of the actresses in his co-starring group, and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, with a quartet of his actors in the lead roles. to October 2007, he premiered at the San Nicolò in Spoleto with an elaborate dramaturgy from Moby Dick by Herman Melville, which marked the meeting between Latella and Giorgio Albertazzi, the ideal interpreter of Captain Ahab, surrounded from a fine group of actors, assiduous companions of the director's work. In March 2008, Latella staged La trilogia della villeggiatura at the Schauspielhaus in Cologne, with German and Italian actors. Meanwhile, since the beginning of 2007, he had begun to working with the whole group on a project to study and disassemble Hamlet, which premiered in June 2008 at the Teatro Astra in Turin, as part of the Festival delle Colline Torinesi, under the title: NOT TO BE project Hamlet´s Portraits.
On May 14, he premiered at the Schauspielhaus in Vienna, as part of the Festwochen, Wild wuchern die Wörter in meinen Kopf. Ein Triptychon (Wildly the words luxuriate in my head. A triptych), a dramaturgy by Alexandra Millner based on texts by Josef Winkler.
from always Antonio Latella lives his work as a primary need: he approaches to an author, his world, his time and stays there to long. However, he always arrives at staging through a workshop path of knowledge. This way of working ensures that each of his productions is, at the same time, a performance to itself and part of a research project, and it has fostered, over time, the formation of a group of actors and collaborators with whom he maintains an elected relationship.

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