He looks like a character from a cartoon or a silent film. White lead face, glasses and mustache. He is sitting there in the proscenium, he looks at us with a smiling face, a little dazed, while the audience enters the room. Behind him, the backdrop of an abstract sea from where first a red sun will rise, then others. He is Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), who we will immediately find on stage, multiplied in other figures dressed like him, then changing costumes and physiognomies. They enter happily jumping, illuminated by large bull’s eyes, freezing in mimic poses, and presenting themselves as if in a metaphysical cabaret. They are “one, none, one hundred thousand”. The emblematic title of Pirandello’s text immediately comes to mind for me to compare to the Portuguese writer. If not exactly one hundred thousand, there were still many people who lived in the mind and writing of Bernardo Soares, alias Pessoa, as demonstrated by his numerous heteronyms.
“Each of us is more than one, he is many, he is a verbosity of himself,” he said. A multitude of characters who inhabited him and with whom he built his narrative, giving life to real alter egos. Evoking the different personalities and giving them imaginative consistency is that master with a fervent theatrical imagination tout court who is Robert Wilson in the show Pessoa – Since I’ve been me. Commissioned by the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, by the director Marco Giorgetti, together with the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris (co-production Stabile del Friuli Venezia Giulia, Stabile di Bolzano, Sao Luiz in Lisbon and Festival d’Automne in Paris with the Téâtre de la V ille de Luxembourgh), the show made its world premiere in Florentine theatre, with great success. And it couldn’t be otherwise. Wilson’s hand admirably blends poetry, music, singing, mime, architecture, painting, design, composing paintings of a single visual fresco in movement as it is in his recognizable style.
The title is inspired by a fragment of The book of restlessness by Pessoa, translatable into “Since I am”, a novel without plot and linearity, divided into fragments Of thoughts. There are philosophical speculations, aesthetic and existential beliefs, sociological observations, literary tastes, maxims and aphorisms. Pessoa’s poetry, that is, «is a profound questioning of language as existence – he explains Darryl Pinckneyplaywright of Since I’ve been me –. The strength of the writer’s poetic imagination lies in his will to write and continue writing against all doubt and in his extraordinary ability to do so by passing indifferently from one language to another.”
The poetic verses, like monologues, flow from one character to another, bouncing off the mouths of the seven performers who break down and recite in the different languages practiced by Pessoa: Portuguese, French, English and Italian. They are detached passages that tell, also with the sound of different languages, his existence. Director Wilson evokes it, together with his moods, creating a dream world, whose refined formalism we all know, with his brightly colored lights (the sudden lighting up of red in one of the sequences of the show is dazzling ), the clarity of the graphic sign of his scenography with the bright changing color of the backdrops in front of which stand figures illuminated in full or on their faces, or who proceed against the light, in black clothes against the white backdrop.
Symbolic objects fill the scene – a series of tables and chairs in a row that will take flight together with the tablecloths, a large stylized sailboat and a miniature one that wanders suspended, a continuously ticking typewriter, some cypress trees, electric torches that probe the darkness -, while a large bird and a hedgehog cross it. All between gusts of music, blues and dark sounds, sounds of breaking glass that mark the repetition of phrases, screeches, sudden explosions, pouring rain.
Wilson renders Pessoa’s psychic state as if in mid-air, distilling with irony and drama, lightness, comedy, formal rigor, the gestures, postures, hints of dance of the excellent performers, who are: the Portuguese Maria de Medeirosthe Afro-French Aline Belibithe Brazilian Rodrigo Ferreirathe Italian-Albanian Klaus Martinithe Franco-Brazilian Jnaina Suaudeaand the Italians Sofia Menci And Gianfranco Poddighe. At the end, dressed as sailors, they sing and dance a blues.
“In a great unified dispersion, I make myself ubiquitous,” Pessoa said of himself, admitting that he understood within his soul “a multitude of beings, conscious and unconscious, analyzed and analytical, who gather in an open fan.” And Robert Wilson gives us a prismatic range of impeccable visual magic with his Pessoa – Since I’ve been me to remind us, as Pessoa said, that «existence is a mystery», and that we too, like Pessoa, «We are full of many characters».
After the world premiere at the Pergola in Florence, the show is expected at the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, from 5 to 14 November, and from there it will begin an international tour, also touching Italy with its debut at the Rossetti Theater in Trieste, from 13 to February 16, 2025.
