La bottega del caffè

Igor Horvat, an actor with long and solid experience, measures himself with an important directorial test by staging one of Goldoni's most famous comedies. Emanuele Aldrovandi - a prolific author whose work has already been recognised by numerous awards despite his young age - signs the dramaturgical adaptation. While maintaining Goldoni's comic mechanism and rhythm, he brings the language closer to the present day and, in making the range of characters compact, offers new interpretative balances to the eight actors on stage.

At the centre of a small Venetian piazza is a coffee shop that becomes the perfect vantage point for observing the plots, deals and scams that are plotted, entangled and brought out into the open. Goldoni paints a shrewd cross-section of a bourgeoisie dedicated to haggling, in which the vicissitudes of the neighbourhood become - by extension - those of the town, the city or an entire society. It lays bare some of the uncontrollable dynamics of a certain dark side of the human soul: eagerness for money, vice of gambling, taste for slander, lust for conquest. Turbid and deep alchemies in which those little big demons lurk, driving us to behaviours and situations that manage to drive us to paroxysm, to farce, to make ourselves bitterly ridiculous. The theatrical mechanism is perfect and the tone of the play is swirling, as is the spiral in which the protagonists have got themselves stuck. To break it, it is necessary for someone - or something - to slip into its gears and jam them. But once the degenerate dynamics have been unhinged, the question remains as to the nature of the balance that will have to be re-established...