La signorina Giulia
“Perhaps, however, one day will come when we will be so advanced, so enlightened, to be able to observe with indifference the brutal, cynical, cruel spectacle that existence offers us. Then we will have defused the inferior and unreliable instruments of thought called sentiments, which have become superfluous and harmful for the maturation of the instrument of judgment.” August Strindberg – Preface
“When the space is too small you make love to whoever is there, to the last man on earth, you contend with the other woman, you try to seduce him knowing that in a few moments you will hate him. When the space is too small, if someone rises above our heads it seems to us that this is the God, a gigantic Count ready to trample us microbes with his boots made of mud, in a sadistic tip-tap.
The clean space gets dirty with our bodies.
The corner of a room in a provincial house, suffocating, a micro-world where no one chooses anything and one enters the body of the other to occupy as little space as possible”. I continue my research on the self-imposed boundaries of my generation, after Ghosts, The Glass Menagerie, The house of Bernarda Alba, The dead city, Fedra, aware that the concept of lockdown now questions the viewer about the physical and mental limits of our existence on a daily basis.
Miss Julie is considered the progenitor of the European movement known as “naturalism” and August Strindberg, edgy and violent, in Italy often suffers from truth’s simplification. If it’s true that Strindberg’s work is part of Zola’s new formula “to make true, to make great and to make simple”, we must remember the great inconsistencies, the inability of the normal, and the enormous theatrical stature of the immoral Swedish playwright.
Three orphans live in a space where it’s impossible not to bend with time, where life is more tiring than work, in a hostile house from which we would all like to escape. Over the course of one night we figure out how to manage this wait, before the end, trying to dance, sing and lose ourselves in oblivion so as not to hear the noise of silence; if in the macabre wait of Endgame or Waiting for Godot it is the dead and the vagrants who have to manage nothingness, in Strindberg it is the children who have to suffer the impossibility of the future.
In the fear of tomorrow, the only stupid solution is a game of massacre, intellectual cannibalism. Deception. Theatre. “Julie: Excellent, Jean. You should be an actor.”
Leonardo Lidi