The poor man's hotel

Thursday 18 April 2024, 18.00 | Sala Riccardi – Donizetti Theatre

About L’ALBERGO DEI POVERI
Meeting with Massimo Popolizio and the company

Also known as The Shallows, or On the Bottom, or even The Dormitory, Maksim Gor’kij's great drama, first performed in Moscow in 1902, was renamed L’albergo dei poveri by Giorgio Strehler in 1947, on the occasion of the memorable direction that inaugurated the Piccolo Teatro di Milano in May 1947. It is this last title that Massimo Popolizio has decided to re-propose to the public, by virtue of its emblematic and poetic, as well as historical, value.
L’albergo dei poveri è a great choral drama, which could be defined Shakespearian in its skilful dosage of pathos, social denunciation, bitter comedy, philosophical and moral reflection on human destiny. The large number of actors on stage obliges the director to find a rhythm suited to the continuous change of situations and points of view, in a crescendo of tension made even more evident by the narrowness of the space evoked: a refuge of derelicts and alcoholics where the characters spend their days trying not to succumb to despair and the inertia of defeat. It is a challenge that, after Stanislavsky, who was the first director of Gor’kij's drama, has been taken up by great masters of theatre direction, such as Strehler, and also cinema, among others, Resnaise Kurosawa. If great works travel through time to be reread at each generation from different angles, Popolizio's directing style, his way of directing actors and the theatrical mechanism as a whole, seems particularly suited to writing a new chapter in this history of interpretations.
Our world is not the world of 1902, nor is it the world of 1947: even the very concept of «poverty has changed, but the dramatic energy, the visionary force, the desperate lucidity of Gor ’kij's characters is still intact. Massimo Popolizio continues his artistic and civil research by bringing to the stage the choral drama by Maksim Gor’kij. A philosophical and moral reflection on human destiny, an act of denunciation of the living conditions of a part of society that has all but disappeared, the text, in Emanuele Trevi's adaptation, retains all its visionary force and desperate clarity.