by August Strindberg

 

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direction and light disegn  by Mattia Sebastian

 

Opening performances of the International Theatre Festival, Japan 2007

Toga Mura Arts Park, artistic director Tadashi Suzuki

 

Italy: Teatro Out Off November 2013

 

with

Benedetta Laurà

Mattia Sebastian

Alessio Mizzan

Maria Noemi Regalia

 

Italian version

Arianna Tyer 

Eleonora Malliani

Giovanni Gioia

 

The bourgeois family and the imposed social status imposition

 

Director notes 

The characters of this tragedy lived in separate worlds: speaking different languages, each of them live as in a dream, without any connection with others.

 

The mother, dressed in mourning as a Queen of operetta, sitting on large black sealed packs because of the seizure of their assets at the center of a red carpet, speaks, laughs, eats and cries.  Gerda's husband, Axel, the mother's lover, wants to conquer the rocking chair's where the husband died, which is in his predatory view  the sign of  power, the throne. Gerda the little anorexic daughter, does not speak anymore. She use silence as a primary form of communication, she walk, like a gosht, on the bottom of the stage dragging a empty infante wheelchair, symbol of its sterility. His brother Friedrick is an alcoholist, he drink to warm up and to soothe coughs. He lives in a small cage like a monkey, eat the paper of his writings for hunger and play all the time with some matches in a bid to warm up, warm up a life that will end in burning house cleaner.

 

Elisa, a Medea grotesque and small-bourgeois, believed to be the a Pelican, the animal that gives his blood to feed her little. After psychologically had  murdered her husband, she is now killing for  cold and starve his two sons: the alcoholist Friedrick and the ill Gerda, with the  husband of whom has a romantic relationship from a long time. 

 

The first title of this tragedy was "the sleepwalkers", changed later in "The Pelikan", through which the author wants to bring out the unconsciousness of human being through the false values of bourgeois society; construct a family around an appearance of wealth, build on contraction of debts to maintain a welfare state. After the father's death, Elisa huseband,  the family  discovered her self drained of any link. The feelings lie in the abyssal depths of suffering.

 

The four protagonists of this tragedy are the same that collide in "Hamlet": the mother (Gerturde-Elisa), the son (Hamlet-Friedrick) the sister (Ophelia-Gerda) and the brother-in-law, the husband of the daughter (Axel-King Claudius), including also the ghost of Hamlet's father identified here with the rocking chair of Elisa's husband recently passed away. The dreams of each one of them disappear swallowed in a vicious circle that will bring the demands of this family to self-destruction.

 

Mattia Sebastian

 

Press: 

 

Italian press il giorno IL PELLICANO