Luca Marinelli returns to Spoleto to direct An Affair for an Academy.
The preview of the 67th Festival dei Due Mondi is approaching : it is already to end of May the most anticipated date. Luca Marinelli returns to directing An Affair for an Academy, a theatrical transposition of Franz Kafka's famous 1917 short story, a play that was a great success in the 2023 edition marking the directorial debut of the Italian actor winner of a David di Donatello, two awards at the Venice Film Festival and two Silver Ribbons. The show once again stars a magnetic Fabian Jung at Teatro Caio Melisso Spazio Carla Fendi for four performances from Thursday, May 30 to Sunday, June 2 (at 8:30 p.m., 8:30 p.m., 5 p.m.). You can purchase tickets (from 15 to €45) at
Luca Marinelli recounts, "What the audience will hear is a repetition of the dynamic that Kafka recounts at the beginning of his text: this monkey who from five years old has entered the world of men and is beginning to to master "speech." But monkeys hear with their bellies and have not mastered language. Fabian does not speak Italian and for us this has been a key aspect and a fun starting point." Rot Peter is the name of the monkey to that Kafka gives voice to in 1917 in a short story: Peter is captured and, while in captivity, realizes that he can imitate humans very well and secure his freedom. After five years, anthropologists find themselves listening to a monkey turned academic speaker. Marinelli continues, "When I met Fabian ten years ago, I immediately thought he was perfect for this role. I fell in love with his being on stage. We started to thinking to how to bring Kafka's text to the stage, even though we still didn't know which one of us should play it. Then I realized that the role was Fabian's because it was stimulating for me to watch him play it, it came natural for me to get off the stage to lead him." Jung adds, "The monkey is a fighter, it's up to the audience to decide whether it will be a winner or a loser. For the monkey there is no other option but to move forward on the path he has charted." A Report for an Academy deals in grotesque terms with the plight of those who are forced to to live an existence that does not belong to them in order to conform to the dictates of society and derive a form of freedom from it.
Born in 1984, Fabian Jung originally from Münster, grew up to Leipzig and then studied acting at the Ernst Busch Academy of the Arts in Berlin. In 2012, his first meeting with Luca Marinelli lays the groundwork for the Kafka project. The careers of the two artists proceed and the idea remains on hold. Jung will take part to in various theatrical collaborations, from the Chemnitz ensemble to the Berlin Schaubühne, from the Staatstheater Saarbrücken to the Schauspielhaus Hamburg, to name a few. Jung thus returns to working with Luca Marinelli on Kafka's Italian-language text to premiere it at Festival dei Due Mondi.