Miser.

Thursday 13 February 2025, 6 pm | Sala Musica – Teatro Donizetti

About L’AVARO
A meeting with Ugo Dighero and the compagnia

The meeting Maria Grazia Panigada

coordinates the meeting.

Ugo Dighero, already a highly appreciated protagonist in the works of Stefano Benni and Dario Fo, confronts himself for the first time with a great classic, playing Harpagone in the new production directed by Luigi Saravo. In the comedy by Molière we witness an epic clash between feelings and money. The protagonist è is willing to sacrifice the happiness of his children, so as not to have to provide them with a dowry and instead acquire new wealth through their marriages.
Saravo's direction sets the play in a dimension that recalls our everyday life, juggling different temporal references, from smartphones to 1970s clothes to the commercials that torment Arpagone (advertising is the devil that could lead him into the temptation of spending his beloved money). Paolo Silvestri's original music also moves on different planes, while Letizia Russo's new translation, fresh and direct, helps give the whole thing a contemporary rhythm.

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The narrative of L’Avaro by Molière revolves around a central theme, to which all the others are linked: money. Money and its preservation, its squandering, gambling, the acquisition of goods and their degradation leading to the acquisition of new goods, loans, interest and the power relations that descend from money. In our consumer-oriented contemporary world, defined by the need to circulate money in pursuit of infinite economic growth, Harpagon's conservative and immobilist gesture, from a financial point of view, sounds subversive to us, in clear opposition to consumer tyranny, to the advertising that drives it, and to that pathology of desire that sees substitution as its foundation. If we analyse the core of the text, i.e. the conflict between Arpagone and his entourage, we find ourselves faced with the conflict of two economic visions: a consumerist one in the style of twentieth-century capitalism and a relatively new, conservative one, which opposes consumption and is oriented towards the conservation of goods, their re-use, their exchange and, finally, the protection of them, first and foremost those goods defined as “natural goods”. We do not want to say that Harpagon is a positive hero, that he is moved by an ideological drive, but, without a doubt, that with his attitude he is clearly in opposition to the twentieth-century capitalist economy and more in line with the conservative vision.
Around him move the other characters, apparently victims of his tyranny, but, in reality, figures devoted to ideals clearly recognisable in this shift of context. These figures lament their imprisonment, their forced submission to Harpagon's will, but in reality they are subjected above all to the economic constraint that binds them to him, potentially able to escape that tyranny by abandoning their homes and the possessions promised by inheritance and salaries.

Luigi Saravo