Theater lesson for actors, directors and similar: «This is my first monologue; 70 minutes of words and memory, without a microphone, the enemy of the theater, unless it is a reading. The voice, artificially amplified, distances us from the action, which is life on the stage and cannot pass through an object that takes it away.” Illustrious doyen of the scene, 90 years old on 2 April, after Neil Simon’s “Irresistible Boys” at the Diana, Umberto Orsini returns to Naples to propose, between tonight and Sunday at the Mercadante, «The memoirs of Ivan Karamazov», dramaturgy based on «The Brothers Karamazov» by Dostoevsky, written with Luca Micheletti, who directed.
Ivan is the most elusive character in the novel, tormented and cerebral, an atheist in reaction to the injustices that God allows, devoted to suicide but in love with life, overcome by the guilt of considering himself the instigator of parricide. Yet, instead of him, his brother Dmitrij is condemned in court. Orsini met Ivan in 1969. In Sandro Bolchi’s Rai drama, he gave him that look – almost albino hair, intellectual glasses – which entered the imagination of several generations. And he kept it with him for decades, evoking it in 2013, at the theatre, in “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”. Now, here he is again, Ivan, the only character whose end is not told. The author abandons him to cerebral fevers and demonic visions. The actor takes him back, taking him away from the ghostly non-place of remorse, in which he wandered, imagining a landing place.
Orsini, 90 years old on April 2nd: he celebrated them in the company of his… friend, life partner, obsession? “No. Rather, I celebrate my perseverance in theater. I don’t live with him, I identify with his rebellion against the injustices of the world. I am agnostic, but the spiritual impulses that fascinate me; that fury in saying things is typical of Russians and their nineteenth-century youth. I don’t interpret their soul, but the flow of words and their internal debate, proposed on stage, create something comparable to the discussions that kids today have debating not about God, but about football.”
And then: «Ours is not a usual monologue, with lectern and pianist, but a complete setup, equipped with splendid scenography, the rubble of that courtroom in which, in the novel, the story was completed and in which today Let’s immerse ourselves in Ivan again, more than two centuries after the facts. Thanks to him I strengthen the memory of my presence in that novel. There is a bond that unites the decrepit me and that young man with almost albino hair from ’69. Micheletti and I imagined a dystopian reality. Without his own ending, Ivan continues to exist on stage. As Nathalie Serrault states, “man’s true life begins only after his disappearance”. Hamlet and Macbeth do not die, even though they do so on stage. In that court now in ruins Ivan remains to have his own end.”
The dramaturgical expedient thus embodies the poetics of the double. In him Dostoevsky is reflected, in him the actor-man Orsini. Thanks to an old tape recorder, his young voice from ’69 resonates among the ruins of the courthouse. Devil’s artifice, thinks today’s Ivan. Impossible. Believing in the devil would lead one to accept his opposite, the cruel God who makes the innocent suffer.” And what end did he reserve for him? «The recognition of guilt. Ivan wants to be punished for having instigated Smerdjakov to kill his father: “I am responsible”, he exclaims. And I’ll make him say it, finally! In the name of Serrault, and of time that expands, the hidden deity of the entire history.”
Speaking of time, how does it compare to being 90? «Planning a mock-autobiographical show, “Prima del Tempo”, written with Massimo Popolizio and directed by him». The theme? «In keeping with the question: an actor, in the dressing room, retraces his life, which is mine, but also that of an era, Italy from the 60s to today. I will recall Visconti, Zeffirelli, Falk, Pani, the ghosts of friends who passed away younger than me… through suggestions, reminders, memories, projections and other complex technical devices, posters that fall like dry leaves, me taking steps between gigantic legs : those of the Kesslers.”
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