Political figures rarely appear in Italian theater drama. Instead, Sergio Claudio Perroni has chosen politics and its voices as the theme of his own creation, composing two one-act plays that have as a common thread the figure of Nilde Iotti. A singular and in some ways daring operation. In fact, if there is an area today that appears worn out, even unlistenable, it is precisely that of politics and its vociferations. And this happens because, like its protagonists, the listening plane of politics in Italy is always the same. But let′s see how the author of The Thirteenth Point manages to to vary it.

In the first act, Perroni lets us hear the voice of Nilde Iotti, whose first-person narrative delivers the ghost of an exemplary biography, where life and politics seem to illusorily coincide, even too much so.

In the second act, the secretary of a major (opposition) party and his closest aides converse in the dressing room of a TV studio and argue (but the secretary remains eloquently mute throughout the play) about the thirteenth point of a setlist prepared for the leader′s face to to face with the head of the opposing faction, currently in government. to a certain point in the play the woman who is to make up the secretary for the broadcast breaks into the play. She is a woman of the people, witty, sensual, and, in short, with her mimetic charisma, she will to become the arbiter of the ongoing dispute between the politicians (the issue is whether it is appropriate to quote Iotti, as the thirteenth point of the set list provides, bringing to back a cumbersome ghost of the past now from all forgotten) imposing on them her own point of view, her own orientation. Her voice will gradually mix with that of the politicians to the point of blurring them, until the final surprise, which it is best not to reveal in order to leave the viewer the pleasure of discovering it.

Thus, in the two texts confront each other the golden age of politics as a struggle for the affirmation of Italian democracy, the role of women and the civil conquests pursued for them by Iotti, and on the other hand the inconclusive and unrealistic vociferation, the impotent paralysis, the vacuity and staleness of the current politicalism. But there are other important backgrounds that Perroni′s text manages to to stir, from that of the gap between a hyperbolic rationality (an excess of control) and the (unspoken) desire to recognize even in the political space citizenship to the unpredictable, that is, to the sentimental drift, entrusted to the solemn voice of Iotti who recalls her own life, to that, ineffable, of the rite of regeneration of today′s politics and its illusion of buying a soul by wearing new masks.

With the skeptical detachment of diviners, Perroni set out for us to listen to voices present and distant, voices of the living that seem dead, and voices of the dead that seem alive. Voices that chase the poised soul of politics in Italy. Poised between soul and form, between life and death, between the Pantheon and suburra.

Roberto Andò

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