Coinciding with the 20th anniversary of Daniele Lievi's death and an exhibition dedicated to his figure as an artist, set and costume designer, the CTB Teatro Stabile di Brescia, presents a new staging of Georg Trakl's Bluebeard , directed by Cesare Lievi, with original sets by Daniele Lievi.
A refined show first performed at the Theatre Biennale in 1984 and revived in 1992 at the Cividale del Friuli Festival with great success in the double Italian and German version (Daniele Lievi, UBU prize for memory at the latter revival), Bluebeard is based from on a lyrical fragment-originally conceived as a puppet show-by Georg Trakl, one of the greatest Austrian poets who lived to the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The show defined at its debut as a visual poem that stands out for the extreme refinement of its staging and its extraordinary adherence to the author's spirit, is rich in visionary cues and apparitions that echo the poetics of the "out-of-scale" typical of puppet theater, to which is continually alluded to.

(...) the double offering in German and Italian versions of an almost "miniature" show, the enchanting Bluebeard that Cesare and Daniele Lievi, director and set designer/costumier, have drawn from a fragmentary text, originally conceived as a puppet show, by Austrian poet Georg Trakl. In his short and ill-fated life, Trakl was obsessed with disintegration and death felt also, or especially, as the "horizon" of love, and his interest in the legend of Bluebeard cannot be so surprising. Trakl was, when he wrote this dramatic fairy tale, 23 years old; to 27, in 1914, he died crushed by unhappiness and drugs. In the play, the text leavens and breaks down into a kind of visual poem, a fluid mosaic of appearances that draws party from the poetics of "out-of-scale" and carving implicit in puppet theater, to which is continually and subtly alluded to, to reconcile in the most unexpected and suggestive of ways the infinite mortuary delicacy of art nouveau and the compositional rigor of abstract art (to name two universally known names, Klimt and Mondrian).Rather than staging the terrible fairy tale, the Lievi tell it from scratch with images, with the bodies of the actors made images, or rather with the conflict that bodies and images sustain in order to appear, to exist, among the narrows of a moving geometry made up of black bulkheads that slide, close, close again, of mournful crosses, of precipitous guillotines. They, the images, have the primary function of speech; and Trakl's words become sound image alongside the music of the excruciating soundtrack. And all within a "box" that offers a stage opening of two by two meters! With Bluebeard began in '84 (thanks to Franco Quadri, who proposed the show produced "privately" by the two authors to the Venice Biennale) the Lievi's artistic adventure. The show was revived last year, after Daniele's death, in a production by the Burgtheater in Vienna, of which Cesare has since become one of the most prestigious directors; and German-speaking critics considered it the best show of '91. I remember it with joy, because I admired from time the work of both of them and because I consider Cesare one of the most interesting directors of these years.Giovanni Raboni