CLEOPATRÀS
by Giovanni Testori
with: Marta Ossoli
Directed by: Mino Manni
Assistant Director: Serena Lietti
Lighting Design: Alberto Gualdoni
Produced by: Serena Lietti
Performance produced with the support and collaboration of:
Municipal Administration of Castel San Giovanni, Diana Ceni, Giulio Fassina, Francesco Paladino, Angelo Sordi, Nuccia Zuterni
For our members and friends of Casa Testori, tickets are available at a discounted price of €12,
please mention Casa Testori at the time of booking.
“Nothing ends and nothing begins. Everything remains still like this, without an answer.” – G. Testori
What remains of the “great queen” Cleopatra once the crown of Egypt is removed? Is she still the magnificent empress capable of terrifying and subjugating entire peoples to her whim, or merely a local “bagascia” (slang: promiscuous woman) claiming a past that never existed?
What reaches us through the centuries beyond the polished aura of the myth?
Testori’s work, with its innovative and forceful power, brings us closer to a character who might seem distant and difficult to relate to our contemporary world. His Cleopatràs, stripped of royal garments and clothed only in flesh and blood, speaks to us in a raw and throbbing language, in a dialect that belongs to everyone and evokes an Italy long forgotten.
The “queen” is represented in her purest essence, in the universality of her being a Woman—a woman who has fully lived, loved, enjoyed, and irrevocably lost everything. Testori intones the lament, the “laio” of the widow, who has experienced war and emerged defeated; a lament of death that, however, flows into a passionate hymn to life: through memories of her homeland, the woman relives the golden times of love with her “Tugnàs.”
Testori’s last work, Cleopatràs, is part of the Tre Lai trilogy, along with Erodiàs and Mater Strangosciàs, through which he bids farewell to life and to a landscape that is at once the land of birth and a road that leads back to where the writer’s heart and tenderness seem to have left their “magone” (melancholic pang). It is a very Lombard tension, full of processions through woods, sensual calls, and desires that scream and yearn.
Drawing on Dantean inspirations, the staging conveys the eternal torment of a mythical figure whose fate is as tragic as it is universal. The director’s attention to the evocative power of the images—alternating moments of great poetry with passages of strong emotional impact—creates a performance in which sacred and profane, love and death, merge into an incandescent and deeply poetic union through a raw, pulsating, barbaric, and sublime language. Unique and immortal.
Just like its author.
Marta Ossoli, winner of the 2017 Franco Enriquez National Award for Best Actress for her performance in Cleopatràs.
Info and bookings:
biglietteria.teatrocarlorossi@gmail.com
Tel. 392 1512590 – 0377 460436
For info and tickets: Teatro Comunale Carlo Rossi