Appointment to London is a brand new play for the theater, written from Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the world's most esteemed writers, who also offers in this text some of the suggestions to he holds most dear.
The story it tells is an acute and profound reflection on the theme of identity and the secret lives of people.
The play is also an investigation into the values of friendship and feelings, into that subtle thread that binds us as human beings, as man's deep attraction to the other from self.

Two friends from childhood and youth, both Peruvian, reunite to London after many years during which they had had no contact. In their meeting they relive the past, mixing good memories with bad stories they thought were now buried or of which, perhaps, they were unaware.

A theater strongly inspired by literature in a fertile exchange between different expressive languages.
The acting cast of the show once again features an undisputed leading actress of Italian theater, Pamela Villoresi together to David Sebasti.

A man, fulfilled, fully occupied, seemingly happy, in a break between a trip and a business meeting, is overwhelmed from a restlessness that sets in motion a subjective and inner, strongly dreamlike journey that confronts him to himself, his most secret fantasies, to a game of mirrors and refractions in which he struggles to to re/find himself.
The fantastic projections that surface from the depths of his being, overbearing and unstoppable, activate and generate an "other" from self, attractive and repulsive, strongly seductive.
The encounter confronts the man with his possible other identity: like a two-faced Janus he is mirrored, "his secret life" explodes in a series of possible variations, all of which are explored, re/seen or re/created.
Throughout the play, "identities" chase each other, confront each other until to a possible solution, always and ever open.
Identity: this is the central theme of the text.
And that complex of drives/emotions dreams and behaviors that form in the course of our lives what we call "personality," in the protagonist of the play find the most open of representations; the possible ways, the different possibilities are traversed with anxiety and desire until to a non-trivial, fascinating, feared, desired conclusion.
T. S. Eliot in the "Four Quartets" writes: "... what could have been and what has been / tend to one end that is ever present. /Passes echo in memory / along the corridor we did not take / toward the door we never opened / on the rose garden..."
It is in this ridge, in this border zone, that the protagonists constantly move, poised between a real world and an imaginary one equally concrete and experienced with the same intensity as real life.
Vargas Llosa's text is an enigma, a fathoming of the deepest and most hidden part of every human being: as he puts it, "a subject that has always fascinated me ... fiction and life, the role that the one plays in this one, the way in which one and the other feed and mingle, repel and complement each other in every individual destiny ... and the stage is the privileged space for representing that magic of which people's lives are also made: that other life that we invent because we cannot really live it, but only dream it thanks to the wonderful lies of fiction."
Our play is a theatrical game that also makes use of complex languages, projected images perceived as ghosts, which help to reveal uncomfortable truths buried deep inside the protagonist.
The scene is a concrete space that continuously opens to a series of other possible visions, thus creating in the viewer a vertigo, helping him to break a view of the everyday towards a possible elsewhere, towards a different world from the real one.
The original music supports this project by evoking other possible worlds, nostalgia and lost places, a garden of memory that never turns out to be consoling.
The theatrical machine indulges and supports the actors engaged in this difficult journey in order to help them to continuously create and re/create that complexity that answers to the name of identity.

(Maurizio Panici)

"Appointment to London" does not take place in the world of the real, of the truthful, but translocates into the pure subjectivity of the protagonist; a territory that, although at first it seems to be made up only of painful and tender memories, we discover at the end that it is made up mostly of inventions: a world of fiction. In this way, even in this opera, above and below what I intended to be the central themes of the story -- friendship, the forging of identity as a vital creative and rebellious act, the rituals and evils of sex in people's secret lives -- a topic imposed itself on me that has been a recurring passion of mine in several of my novels and all the plays I have written: fiction and life, the role that the one plays in this one, the way in which one and the other feed, confuse, repel and complement each other in every individual destiny. Without a doubt, the stage is the privileged space for representing that magic of which people's lives are also made: that other life that we invent because we cannot really live it, but only dream of it thanks to the splendid lies of fiction.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Maurizio Panici
Studied architecture, has been involved in theater since 1976. From 1979 to 1990 he is an actor and is particularly involved in a project on the philosopher Friederich Nietzsche. In 1986 he founded the Argot Cooperative, which established itself as an essential point of reference for contemporary dramaturgy. And it is precisely for his work to in favor of contemporary dramaturgy,from always central to his work, that he received three AGIS Golden Tickets. He also received in 1993 the IDI (Italian Drama Institute) Special Recognition, in 1994 the Equa Mercede Prize awarded by the Dramatic Authors´ Union, in 1997 the Critics´ Award of the National Association of Theatre Critics and in 2007 the Franco Enriquez Prize for Directing.
Testimony to his constant commitment in this field is the direction of numerous texts by Italian authors: from Giuseppe Manfridi (L´inno dell´ultimo anno) to Alberto Bassetti (Sopra e sotto il ponte),from Edoardo Erba (Vaiolo) to Pierpaolo Palladino (II cappello del papa), from Remo Binosi (Che magnifica serata) to Luca De Bei (La Spiaggia, Flaiano Prize 2001)to Sergio Pierattini (La Maria Zanella) whose performers are now some of the most interesting protagonists of the Italian scene between cinema and theater (among others,Valerio Mastandrea, Massimo Wertmuller, Marco Giallini, Rolando Ravello, Paolo Triestino, Sabrina Impacciatore).
An important part of his commitment as a director is also aimed at to restoring the classics to their original popular dimension : exemplary in this sense are Romeo and Juliet in 1995 (debut at the Borgio Verezzi festival) and Troilus and Cressida which inaugurated the 1999 Biennial of Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean , starring Antonio Latella and Danilo Nigrelli .
From the artistic collaboration with Pamela Villoresi and Arnaldo Pomodoro were born in 1996 Anouilh's Antigone and the rewriting of Orestea/Atridi as Mafia War ( Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza1998).
Carlo Goldoni's La Locandiera, starring Pamela Villoresi is a guest at the Théatre des Italiens in 2000 ,the musical comedy Liliom by Ferenc Molnar with Massimo Venturiello, Fiorella Rubino and the participation of the Chorus Le mystère des voix Bulgare debuts to Taormina Arte in August of the same year, Luigi Pirandello's I Giganti della Montagna, with Mariano Rigillo and Anna Teresa Rossini inaugurate the Settimana Pirandelliana in Agrigento in 2001.
Medea by Euripides was staged at the Teatro Antico in Taormina on May 21, 2003, still starring Pamela Villoresi, with whom he later staged a musical version of Lysistrata by Aristophanes and Three Sisters by Anton Checov, hosted in the most important Italian theaters.
In the summer of 2004 he began his collaboration with the San Miniato Popular Drama Institute, for which he staged the first performance in Italy of David Edgard's Il Dilemma del Prigioniero - starring Maria Paiato and Bruno Armando - and the following year Il Custode dell'Acqua from Franco Scaglia's novel, winner of SuperCampiello 2002, starring Maurizio Donadoni and Carlo Simoni.
Summer 2006 marked the resumption of collaboration with the Festival dei due Mari for which he staged Seneca's Phaedra - starring that Maria Paiato with whom the journey had begun years ago, first with Luca de Bei's La Spiaggia, then Roberto Cavosi's Cinema Impero -starring Mascia Musy - and finally Sergio Pierattini's La Maria Zanella, for which the actress received the PremioUbu in 2005. In 2007, Antigone from Sophocles starring Edoardo Siravo and Silvia Siravo is staged, again at the Teatro Antico di Tindari .
Summer 2006 is also the year of Sul Lago Dorato with Arnoldo Foà and Erica Blanc ,which debuts at the Borgio Verezzi Festival.
In the 2007/2008 season, two more productions that trace an articulated path but always aimed at the contemporary: from one side the staging of Ingmar Bergman's Sinfonia d'autunno with the extraordinary Rossella Falk and Maddalena Crippa, and on the other the staging of a French comedy by Jean - Marie Chevret that received the Premio de la Solidarité et de l'Anti-Racisme awarded by the UN NGOs (a prize for the first time awarded to a theatrical author), L'appartamento è occupato! (Le Squat) starring Paola Gassman.
Finally, in the 2008/2009 season-at the Manzoni Theater in Pistoia- she debuts with Marlene, a brand new play by Giuseppe Manfridi , starring Pamela Villoresi along with to Orso Maria Guerrini and David Sebasti : a play that, penetrating the "Behind the scenes" of Dietrich's life, punctuates in three chapters the events of a sensational human adventure.

‍