On Monday morning in the rooms of the Teatro Comunale di Vicenza the mayor of the City of Vicenza Giacomo Possamai, the president of the Fondazione del Teatro Stabile del Veneto – Teatro Nazionale Giampiero Beltotto and the president of the Fondazione Teatro Comunale Luca Trivellato signed an agreement that will lead to the next three years the TSV on the stage of the Teatro Olimpico. The agreement opens up a new collaboration between the artistic direction of the Ciclo di Spettacoli Classici and that of the Stabile del Veneto in order to include a classical show produced by the Stabile del Veneto in the programming of the Vicenza autumn festival. A result, achieved with the support of the Veneto Region, which responds to the request of the regional law for culture to promote aggregation between subjects from the cultural world and which in doing so strengthens the proposal linked to classical theater in the region, making the most of with prestigious theatrical productions organized by the Stabile del Veneto, a national and international excellence such as the Cycle of Classical Shows.
“I particularly care about this common path which is based on an agreement between the Cycle of Classical Shows and the Teatro Stabile del Veneto, one of the most important production centers in the Region – states the Mayor Giacomo Possamai –. Our city is proud of its autonomy, its capabilities, of an important theater like the Teatro Olimpico and is open to collaborations with other entities in the Veneto as per the recent address of councilor Corazzari to promote a cultural network. We therefore start from a show to then develop a program designed over three years with close collaboration with the artistic directors of the Classics. I thank those who worked in favor of this agreement because I believe it is an element of wealth for our city and a little more pride for the Teatro Stabile which is doing important things”.
ELECTRA
For 2024, enriching the 77th Cycle of Classical Shows at the Olimpico – which sees the artistic direction of Ermanna Montanari and Marco Martinelli – on 15 and 16 October, will be Elettra, the new TSV production directed by Serena Sinigaglia. Sinigaglia tackles Hofmannsthal’s text by involving two extraordinary interpreters such as Federica Rosellini in the title role, of Treviso origins, is currently in all Italian cinemas with Daniele Luchetti’s film Confidenze alongside Elio Germano, thanks to which she is obtaining unanimous praise for her extraordinary interpretation by audiences and critics, and Arianna Scommegna in that of Clytemnestra. Her direction starts from two assumptions: the first is the myth, the origin, that is, that immense work that is Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The trilogy of the oldest of the three Greek tragedians was successfully staged around 458 BC and has come down to us, the only case, intact. The second is the historical period in which Hofmannsthal lived, the period between the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s, in Vienna. A true cultural revolution within all the arts and first of all the theatrical one. The beginnings of what would later become German Expressionism. In Aeschylus the figure of Electra is marginal and yet she has inspired, more than Antigone and Oedipus, a succession of revisitations and rewritings. We have the Electra of Sophocles, that of Euripides, that of Yourcenar, in short this figure, just traced by Aeschylus, bursts into the protagonist in the subsequent story, to the point of even inspiring Freud who attributes to Electra the complex that will forever bear her name. Unlike Aeschylus, the Austrian poet’s extraordinary intuition is to have Electra die, a fact that neither the myth nor subsequent rewritings foresee. Revenge destroys those who harbor it, to the point that, even once accomplished, there is no satisfaction but only exhaustion, emptiness, death. The relationship that Elettra has with her murdered father is morbid, delusional, violent, ultimately useless. Yes, because if you don’t live to get revenge, what’s the point? The other relevant aspect of Hofmannsthal’s vision is the presence of a sort of chorus of servants who comment and negotiate, some for Electra, some for Clytemnestra. And here stands the extraordinary figure of Clytemnestra. She is historically a woman who dared to choose to self-determine, to the point of committing murder. For the poet, a woman corroded by guilt, that she would like to forget, that she thinks it would be her right to forget about her, but that she can’t because she sees reflection in the dreams and in the glow of her daughter’s eyes the weight of the action performed.
