A golden curtain closes the light of the proscenium. Up front the protagonist performs a very sensual dance to the tune of a jazz club version of Je crois entendre encorethe famous novel by Les pêcheurs de perles by Bizet. We remember that golden curtain very well. It evokes memories of distant beloved shows by Federico Tiezzi and his companions. But here the gaze is now captured by the sinuous image of Elena Ghiaurov’s Phaedra. She is wrapped in a long black dress like the two girls who flank her, moving large fans of white feathers. The bob of expertly disheveled blonde hair evokes, no one knows how, Proustian’s Odette de Crécy Swann’s love that Tiezzi had staged a few years ago for Sandro Lombardi. As if to project «la fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé» into other roles, that is, into another century but above all into another world that we could define by bourgeois approximation. Put the coté of Guermantes in place of the court of Troezen which is like saying Versailles. The ancient tragedy of Euripides is, after all, distant. Just look at those two, Ippolito and Teramene, the prince and his advisor, who enter in a clownish dress all ruff and sequins, almost seventeenth century clownish.
WHEN IT OPENS the curtain, at the Bonci Theater (the show is produced by Ert), instead reveals itself to be a space of abstract gloom, dominated in the background by a large reproduction ofAtalanta And Hippomenes by Guido Reni, the one located in Capodimonte, with its nocturnal colors and that idea of suspension of the tragic that it transmits. Love that calls death. A black casing that two large chandeliers cannot illuminate. Phaedra is now lying on a sort of marble dormeuse. Next to her is Bruna Rossi’s mournful Enone who, despite her monastic posture, or perhaps precisely because of this, is somewhat of the black soul of the tragedy, the one who precipitates the story towards a tragic outcome. And in the end she kills herself a little in disbelief of the blame that Jean Racine places on her in the tragedy, proposed here in the translation by Giovanni Raboni. Because you can’t exaggerate in blaming a princess, Racine writes in the introduction. Phaedra then confesses her incestuous passion for Hippolytus, the son of her husband Theseus, who instead seems to hate her.
THE FIRST part, however, is dominated by geopolitics, so to speak, the news has arrived that King Theseus has died and questions of succession arise in Troezen and Athens. At issue are the hereditary rights of the son that Phaedra had from Theseus in conflict with those of Hippolytus, son of an Amazon who is like a foreign barbarian; and the young Aricia could also boast some claims, who lives almost as a prisoner in Troezen due to family ties with Theseus’ enemies. But if Theseus is dead, as they say, Phaedra could find a political agreement with Hippolytus by confessing her passion for him, as Oenone advises her. Hippolytus doesn’t take it well, he bares his sword and points it at the naked breast that she offers him, like Clytemnestra before her son’s sword inOresteia by Peter Stein.
However, Theseus is not dead and his sudden return precipitates the drama towards its natural conclusion. But in that process nothing remains the same, and it’s not just that sudden redness of the light from the chandeliers, the martial arts moves with which Theseus and Hippolytus face each other, growling. We must not be distracted by the traps scattered by the director. The tragedy of the word is Phaedra, where the word is said but does not begin to live, as in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, but is instead immediately retracted. Maybe it’s because Racine’s word always lies in the indecision between meaning and sound, Tiezzi explains, quoting Valery. There is always something that escapes meaning and something that escapes sound. And in that indecision, in that something lies the theater. Phaedra would like to erase with death the accusation of violence that she made against Hippolytus out of jealousy. Theseus would like to stop the curse that he has placed on his son but the god will tear him apart anyway while he is on the run with Aricia.
But the most visible mutation is the one that the protagonist undergoes. Gone is that faint thread of red that purpled her lips, we find her prostrate on the stage, barefoot and wearing a penitential tunic to give her last monologue. Great theater as could be expected. With the contribution of all the other performers, from Marina Occhionero who is Aricia to Alberto Boubakar Malanchino’s Ippolito and then Massimo Verdastro, Martino D’Amico, Valentina Elia. Come back Je crois entendre encore, but it is no longer that of Oriana Curls. That time is now lost.
