Giovanni Scifoni in "Fra': St Francis the Superstar of the Middle Ages'.

How do you talk about St. Francis of Assisi without being monstrously banal? How can this show be staged without sounding like a Jovanotti song?
If I ask an anti-clerical atheist “tell me a saint you like” he will say: Francis. Why does everyone know St Francis? Why have tens of thousands of texts been written about him? Why is he so irresistible? And why him? He was not the only one practising pauperism. At that time, there were plenty of saints and heretical movements that had made the same extreme choice. What was so special about this petty-bourgeois suburban slumdog who left everything behind to become a ragamuffin?
What was special about him was that he was an artist. Perhaps the greatest in history. His sermons were crazy, visionary masterpieces. They were performances of contemporary theatre.
He played with the elements of nature, he improvised in French, quoting passages from the chanson de geste from memory, twisting their meaning, he used the body, the nude, even his own illness, physical pain and muteness.
On 24 December 2023, we celebrated the 800th anniversary of the Greccio nativity scene, the most ingenious (and most copied) invention of Francis. But there was no SIAE at the time.
This monologue, orchestrated with medieval lauds and ancient instruments by Luciano di Giandomenico, Maurizio Picchiò and Stefano Carloncelli, questions the’enormous persuasive power that the pop figure of Francis generates on us contemporaries, and traces the life of the poverello of Assisi and his obsessive effort to recount the mystery of God in every form, right up to the physical wear and tear that would lead him to death: from preaching to the pigs to the composition of the Canticle of Creatures, the first Italian vernacular lyric composition in history.
Francesco sings the beauty of Brother Sun from the darkness of his cell, blind and ravaged by illness. No one in history has narrated God with such ingenious creativity. Francis knew how to enchant audiences, endless crowds, how to make people laugh, cry, how to sing, how to dance. The real problem I had to face in preparing this show was that Francesco was a much better actor than I was.
And then the grand finale, death, the relationship of brotherhood, almost of carnal love, that Francesco had with Sora nostra morte corporale, from which nullu homo alive can escape. Nor will the audience be able to escape from this end, chained in the theatre seats they too will be forced to face the real, the last, great taboo of our contemporaneity: we are not immortal.

Directing notes
Working with Giovanni is exciting because he is a volcanic actor who knows how to do everything well, acting, dancing, singing, playing and even drawing.
We worked during the rehearsals in an almost workshop-like way. Once the direction of the story was shared, everyone proposed digressions, suggestions, new inventions. No one ever imposed anything, nothing was ever definitive, but everything was in the process of becoming.
This is the most beautiful way to build a show, ideas are born from an intuition that is still out of focus, then reworked, metabolised and reworked again until it takes its final form. It was the same with the musicians. They would come up with an arrangement, we would try to tell them what effect we were looking for, and they would readapt it, often giving an even more effective effect. Theatre is an art that is done together, where everyone brings their competence, sensitivity, experience, and when a show is built this way, it is the best guarantee of a good result.
I hope we have succeeded in recounting a beautiful Francis, less hieratic and iconic than the grandiose cinematographic representations, but more human, fragile, even confused and incapable of carrying out the huge task he has given himself.
Sublime and raw, immense and miserable, of the same dough as the great literary and theatrical characters, and like them capable of opening up great questions for us about our lives at all times.
A perfect narrative for Giovanni, who has always had the great skill of managing to deal with elevated themes with simplicity and fun, combining the high and the low in a seductive affabulation.
The musical compositions, by the very talented Luciano Di Domenico, were also created with the same imagination. Reinventing medieval themes until arriving, through variations and modulations, at techno music.
The result of so much work is a show, I believe, unique in its kind, full of narrative, musical and scenic inventions to honour our formidable saint who was named Giovanni like Scifoni and Francesco like me. We could only do it together.

Francesco Ferdinando Brandi