The same noise: The ticchettìo of a stick that supports an abused step. The “Oedipus in Colono” – second tragedy of the 60th. Cycle of classic representations of the ADA in Syracuse – begins with the same noise with which the “Oedipus Re” had closed, three years agoin the same quarry and speechless cavea.
Then Oedipus dated slowly, defeated, the bloody eyes (the truth blinds, as the fault sometimes). This time the path is on the contrary: Oedipus descends towards the scene. Where there is, again, a huge, equal and completely different staircase. The director (but it is better to call him Demurgo, he is more proper) is the same: Robert Carsen. The interpreter is the same: the immense Giuseppe Sartori.
And perhaps the key word of this show, which also puts the strongest signs of the unforgettable setting of 2022 back into play, is only one: transformation. Jungian: as a recovery and non -dissolution of the shadow, as self -acceptance, as integration and pacification. Which is then, thinly, the true ethical and religious sense of ancient theater such as the cohesion of the community, ritual of purification and collective catharsis, in which the “terrible” is questioned and faced together, with the shiny tool of the logos that affects the emotion.
The brutalist scale of nude concrete, a symbol of the power that raises and dominates (the scene is also the work of Radu Boruzescu), has become green declivio of willows, the same green of the park around, sacred space of ascent and elevation, house of the benevolent Eumenids, bright reverse of the fierce darkness of the erinni: Carsen has decided (not beyond, and movement (choreography of Marco Berriel; shining chorifea, as always, Elena Policy Greek), fluids and “green” both, in contrast with the male choir of inhabitants of Colono (head of the German Rosary Choir), limestone and terracotta stone color, the too human human that will stage the offer of Libagioni and the struggle, devotion and violence. The sovereign that we had already seen naked (literally, but also, as if to say, metaphysically), stripped of every tinker and authority, is now exiled by old age and suffering, with the only love support of the Daughters Antigone and Ismene (Fotinì Peluso and Clara Bortolotti, with aspra, bright tenderness).
Like his Oedipus, he blinds that “he sees through the voice”, Giuseppe Sartori is a voice and text (witness) who becomes a bodyin a total dedication-donation to the scene and the public, an offertory that refers to some sacred meal. Sartori had been the proud king and groom of playstrade played by the truth; Now, miraculously, it is the old exile – really blind, with prostheses that limit its visus, and with the original deformity of Oedipus (the etymology of his name: the one who has been wounded at the feet) who torments him – won but not defeated, with a new purity that has been carved out in him, in his awareness of culprits of innocence. No longer empty out of necessity, but purified by the necessary pain.
Oedipus is the center of everything, and not just because Two cities are competing for it: according to the oracle, the community that will host its grave will be lucky and protected. And it will be the right, the ungrateful does not tebe. The Athens of the noble Teseo (the excellent Massimo Nicolini) who says clearly a very precious thing (the text is translated, with the usual elegant expertise, by Francesco Morosi): “I grew up in exile, like you … So I would never turn his back on a foreigner, I would never deny him my protection”. We are out of history and within the perennial human, but these things shine, in our tireless present in which the exiles of every place are rejected supplications.
How, further on, when Teseo and Creon (still, like three years ago, Paolo Mazzarelli, perfectly sharp and hostile, who wears the same clothes as “Oedipus Re”: here the evil is to stay out of the transformation, nailed to the past) face – white against black, welcome against hardness, ethics against opportunism – The dispute of power of all time cannot fail to make us think of other double -breasted men who, today, deal with peace and rare earthly …
And still Polinice (Simone Severini), the “Other offspring” of Oedipus – The daughters female, women of Pietas, the male children, lost in the gear of the struggle for power – He will wear a soldier uniform, before returning to the inevitable war, fratricide and death: the costumes (work of Luis Carvalho) here are perfect functions, meaning bridges.
We remain human, and Oedipus, who experienced the abysses and the peaks of the human, now, after the stairs from which it slipped down and the erots that climbed as an exile, anela to death. But not like the warrior heroes, in an act of magnificent destruction, or as requits from evil, rather to recompose his unity with the community from which he has been too much banned, to give himself to that world to which he turned his shoulders, be welcomed in the green embrace of nature and, together, of the forgiveness of the beneficial goddesses. Pacified.
“Oedipus in Colono”, the last tragedy of Sophocles (he wrote it at 90 years, an incredible age in the ancient world), represented posthumously, is not the perfect device of “Oedipus Re”, yet Carsen, creator “because of raising” but also a concertator of great frescoes (his figure is perfectly embodied by sartori: composing and drying, until the word shines naked, returned in purity), Also this time to distil its profound meaning, moving emotions that several times translate into applause on the open scene, with the public who participates in events that knows very well as if they discovering at that moment. It is the power of that sacred stage and of those who are capable of renewing the word that resounds there every time.
It is replicated, alternating with “Elettra” and then “Lisistrata”, until June 28th.