Director's notes

It seems to me, and I say this with regret, that there is still a need to reiterate the whys and wherefores of theatre. And by theatre I mean the only one I know, the one that is not content to repeat the past like a relic, the one that does not evaluate its existence with the applause meter, as if it were some TV format. Theatre cannot and must not reason around the perception of its own approval or hide behind the search for easy consensus. This would mean abdicating its social purpose. Its raison d'être lies not in approval, but in necessity. Those who, like me, have put their lives in the hands of the theatre suffer from seeing their love treated superficially, reduced to entertainment or, again, voluntarily closed to ever smaller niches of the public, as if it were not enough for themselves. As if, in this new century and in this new millennium, it was essential to re-evaluate the power of this art at all costs, forgetting that it is one of the few remaining instruments capable of keeping alive and nourishing the collective consciousness.
It is a subtle pain, which is renewed every time I see the stage used in ignorance of its power, and not as a place where one risks something. And so it is that the words of Amleto can come to us. They can remind us, with the force of the lines that Shakespeare entrusts to his prince, that we must «treat actors well, because they are the essence of an age’not entertainers, but bodies through which society’can’still look at itself in the mirror. And again his words may suggest to us that to unmask the corruption of the king, to portray the nefariousness of those who govern us, who kill our fathers and screw our mothers, we need a trap, a mousetrap, a trap called theatre. The stage becomes a substitute for the piazza, a place to taunt power. It is a device that forces the spectator into a confrontation with his own guilt. When the spectator sits in the auditorium, he is already accepting to be mirrored in what he will see on stage, without knowing what reflection will be returned to him. Here, then, is the meaning of theatre today: an indispensable trap, against any museum refuge. A place where sincerity - always fragile and elusive - can find a way to reveal itself for an instant. In this, Hamlet remains our contemporary: because he reminds us that theatre does not serve to reassure, but to capture. Not to comfort, but to awaken.
To do this, I have chosen my magnificent seven: a cast of seven possible Hamlets, led by Mario Pirrello, capable of conveying an indispensable distance from the character's identikit, but at the same time a special adherence with the soul of the Prince of Denmark. It is another concept that we can brush up on thanks to this inexhaustible masterpiece: by choosing theatre, one is not satisfied with the form, with the cursed biopic that grips our age, where every performance seems to be reduced to a chronicle disguised as art or an unwanted confession of an ego. I do not seek the prince as we have become accustomed to thinking he should be, nor pain as it should appear. I have constructed another world, a declared artifice, to allow a shared approach through representation.
It is a paradox that has always belonged to the theatre: the more it declares itself to be fake, the more it succeeds in touching the real.
The more the nutshell is faked, the stronger the unveiling will be. «All this seems, because this can be acted out. It's the dress, it's the scene, of pain. What is in me goes beyond the performance» is the key. It is there, in that beyond, that our work lies. Not in seeming, but in showing the limits of seeming. Not in acting, but in letting acting reveal what eludes. The performance does not pretend to show the truth: it wants to accompany us to that point where the spectator realises that the truth does not lie on the stage, but in the resonance that the scene provokes, that it does not show itself, but can reveal itself – as Shakespeare would say – to the eyes of the most sensitive spectators.
The theatre, in this way, returns to being a place of sharing. A place where we recognise that grief always has a guise, that mourning always has a form, but that the substance remains invisible, it surpasses us. The task of the actors is to return the dress, the task of the audience is to perceive the beyond. And in this short-circuit, theatre finds its strength.

Leonardo Lidi