As the Horcynus Orca’s is always young Stefano D’Arrigocentral novel of the European 900, a pandora vase of symbols and metaphors that still concern us. Fifty years after his publication, Taobuk staged him last night with the direction of an absolute genius of our theater, Davide Livermore. At the Antico Theater in Taormina the Maestro used his tested team, the D Wok, the Show Design Paolo Gep Cuccotwo actresses of enormous charm like Caterina Murino and Linda Gennarion stage together with Vinicio Capossela and with the sounds of the Mediterranean of the composer Max Casacci of the Subsonica. But this time there is a great novelty: Livermore recites and it is a great and very pleasant surprise.
We knew it was a baritone, but here he is also a great actor who reads with his powerful voice. The ancient theater, with the Ionian in the background, has thus transformed, thanks to the images into videomapping, in the places of the novel: the house of Gaetaniello, the sea of the Strait, the millennial stones with pastel colors, drawings and houses that seem majolica, painted in flowers, while the faces of the protagonists are projected on the columns: Ciccina Circè, N’dria Cambria and Gaetaniello.
A sensory journey, reads the notes of direction, which by intertwining the songs of the novel to an original dramaturgy, celebrates the complexity of language and the strength of literature in telling the challenges of human existence. But the protagonist, and we say it with the utmost sadness, is the “war whore”, like the one that is in these hours by flareping on the other side of the Mediterranean. “Everyone died of the same death, the war whore, angry of sun”, while a white foam covers the Strait of Messina, perhaps the souls of the dead “.
An operation at times moving, since who could think that we returned again and still to hear the stone of the war even if far from us. And the pain also arises from the “hearsay”, as D’Arrigo calls it and not from the “seen with the eyes”. While chaos governs what he can and the meanness is rampant after September 8, the date of the armistice, the ignominia and the escape of the king. From that chaos the feminates, the orca, and still death. Also The Orca will die while the touching final scene describes the agony of the gigantic animal, its stench that softens the sea of the Strait and the unspeakable fears that triggers among the fishermen. A text of fifty years ago that seems written today.