La commedia della vanità

Claudio Longhi brings Elias Canetti to the stage: an impressive production with almost thirty actors to present the great Nobel Prize-winning author to the public through one of his lesser-known and most topical works.

The Comedy of Vanity, written between 1933 and 1934, published in 1950 and first performed in 1965, describes a dystopian world in which a totalitarian government establishes ‘by law’ that vanity is forbidden and every instrument to keep it alive eliminated. All mirrors are banned and their producers put to death: but more than self-aggrandisement, it is the very idea of identity that is destroyed. What remains? An intricate and changeable lexical substratum; words faithfully rendered by Canetti as he heard them and collected them through the mechanism of the “acoustic mask”, that is, the re-proposition of language without changes or embellishments, whether it be dialect, ungrammatical speech or, on the contrary, courtly. In Claudio Longhi's reinterpretation, this polyphonic chorus overflows from the stage to invest the stalls, restoring to the audience all the urgency and depth - but also the fun - of Canetti's text. In the background, the nightmare of a nascent dictatorship is loudly acclaimed.
The director emphasises that 'It is a harsh criticism, Canetti's, that cannot leave our present, the absolute and unconditional reign of the selfie, indifferent. Yet the text, in its iconoclastic crusade, also induces us to reflect on how representative dynamics are actually constitutive of the identity dimension. Image abstinence induces the dissolution of the self, but this dissolution exasperates, conversely, the need for the self - opening the way to populist and authoritarian-dictatorial swerves. The final part of the play features individuals who, after years of harassment and denial of representation, have lost their identity and therefore devote themselves to erecting a statue of a new dictator. The construction of identity has now turned into a perverse need for them'.