“The Gospel according to Judas” (photo Antonio Parrinello)
Porco Giuda, would be said, to think about it. And he, Judas, would look at us wounded. He is a surprising and continuously injured man – continuously on the cross – Judas, in “The Gospel according to Judas”, a show signed by the Fava, Giuseppe (of which this year the centenary of the birth recites) who wrote the text and his son Claudio who adapted him and took care of itwith great success and all sold out, For the Teatro Stabile of Catania – And the love act is felt, the care that alone, we know, keeps those who left us alive.
An inverted “gospel”which brings us to a timeless present or place (a “southern Milan” is appointed that does not designate a place but a condition), and stages, with unscrupulous respect and peaks of tragic farce, those figures so powerful: the masterdirectly hit by the divine light that wants to be gesture and word, the disciplesPietro Tommaso Matteo and Giovanni, The irregular Maddalena – the other Mary – and he, Judahthe most in love and desperate of the disciples, the traitor, the scapegoat.
Judas Iscariota was Lucifer (a fan, multifaceted David Coco, perfect in summarizing, without a moment of respite, with feverish ardor, the tireless, unhappy fragility of the human) enters on the scene as you are born, crawling in the world, a world made of stairs (the scenes are of Riccardo Cappello) who end up in the dark, made of balconies from which to appear on nothing, with the facades that of the lives (the expedient of the Velario allows plays of light and perspective, an excellent work of Gaetano the apple: the syntax of the lives in the buildings-doors, the thirty money that rain, even a Leonardo selfie of the Last Supper). Judas tells us who he was, who has always been: a poet, a cantor and acrobat that believed in it, in the mission of bringing beauty and meaning to the lives. A subversive, in its way. Certainly a defeat. Gospel meat.
Elisa is his wife (Manuela Ventura, who is also Maddalena And with charismatic, intense skipping skill but brings together the female, leads all that other half of the creation, with its own pain, in this story of males that become subjugated by the divine and fall into the human), it does not understand it and yet it brings him a constant and disappointed love: attention, the human feelings are the heart of the Gospel according to Judah, the ability to love against any logic and gain, An absolute story like that of the Master, a Maurizio Marchetti, a wise starvery good at drawing the thread of irony in the “sacred” yet casual image of the master (also marked by the shirt, otherwise sacred, of Maradona “ladidio”), who also does not disdain the miseries of the body and does not seem to notice those of the soul (others), only to then, in the end, with admirable mastery of registers, to come out of any frame and ask Sacrifice: yes, in this Gospel it is Judas who sacrifices himself for us, even if he is the teacher who dies circumfusted holiness; Judas is “the name to be hated for the promises that will not be kept, for the revolutions that will fail”. Judas “free man, and therefore sinner”.
The disciples, too human humans toothey are wittyly designed by the direction (and very well interpreted in a collective afflatus of great compactness, which are shocked on the notes of “altitude album” or have a hieratic inside a “dies Irae”) as a summary of types and clichés and weaknesses, some also marked in the body by that pervasive and imperfect humanity: Pietro Sgarrupato and willing (and he also traitor, other than, before the rooster singing) by Antonio Alveario; Tommaso Gobbo and doubtful by Liborio Natali; the confused Matteo by Alessandro Romano and the Giovanni Paraculo by Matteo Ciccioli. All – very good and inspired – likewise adoring and cowardly, followers and deserters, of the same substance as the liar journalists, corrupt politicians and the scam builders (Giovanni, he says, had built the bridge over the strait, “collapsed at the passage of the first train”: for that he “became a missionary and revolutionary … to explain” Eggià).
In the end, the only truly amorous acts – of that love promised in the world by the “revolution” of the master always invoked and postponed to any adjustment, deferral, betrayal – will be by Elisa and Judah, who comes to grant the master “his” Maddalena (whose price – guess? – are thirty money).
Oh yes, the master will die and will be composed and cried, and his word will continue, revolutionary and alone, to go to the world. But without the Judas, and the Maddalene (and Joseph Fava) who bring the courage of imperfection as a stigma, the courage to look inside and beyond the words, the courage to cause by paying firsthand, the courage to remain naked and barefoot, no revolution will be possible. Never.