Past event

24 October 2023

Sala Teatro

20:30

25 October 2023

Sala Teatro

20:30

Antonio Latella, one of contemporary theatre’s most significant figures, brings to the stage the most famous of Goldoni's comedies, La locandiera, the first Italian work with a female protagonist, Mirandolina, played here by Sonia Bergamasco, the winner of the Ubu 2022 Award as best actress.

“I have in mind Pina Bausch's Café Müller. I am thinking of a woman who was born and raised in the Inn, which is a place or rather an environment incorporating an infinite number of different worlds.
In Goldoni's text, the theme of inheritance is the pivot around which everything rotates.
Mirandolina, sitting beside her father's deathbed, inherits the Inn, but also her father’s order to marry Fabrizio, the Inn's first serving man. There is in this, I believe, an unconscious identification of the father with the serving man, who as a male is considered to be his virtual heir. More than a husband for his daughter, the father chooses a man to run the Inn, a man who is willing to go to all lengths to protect the Inn.
I believe that Goldoni with this work intended to make a powerful and extreme artistic gesture, a shockingly contemporary gesture: most importantly, we are faced with the first Italian work that has a female protagonist. But Goldoni goes further: he undermines every type of mechanism, formally raises the status of a woman in the service of his customers to that of a woman capable of defeating the entire male universe, and above all of a woman who, with her ability, overcomes the entire Venetian aristocracy. In fact, Mirandolina manages to defeat a knight, a count and a marquis in one fell swoop. And, by choosing in the end the serving man to be her husband, she makes a political choice, putting the servant class in charge of everything, ennobling the merchants and artists, and transforming the Inn into the starting place from which the entire theatrical history of Italy will be rewritten, a history that concerns us all in some way. Goldoni also works on the language he uses, accentuating the Tuscan rather than the Venetian features of his Italian.
To play the role of Mirandolina the actress chosen must be able to put herself at the service of the work, but she must also avoid presenting her female essence as a foregone and terribly flirtatious figure, which is an interpretation that we have often seen on our stages. In many instances, we directors have betrayed the cultural artistic work that the great Goldoni achieved with this work. We have demeaned it, falling into the trap of the obvious and presenting the feminine side in the way that men want to see it: as a game of seduction. Goldoni, instead, with this testament, performed a great civil and cultural operation. We are faced here with a theatrical manifesto that marks the beginning of contemporary theatre, but, through an absurd blindness, the theatre world has instead trivialized it and made it innocent. Our collective mediocrity has never been up to the true level of Goldoni's work and, most likely, that goes for me too. I hope, however, to pay due homage to a master who, with the works of Goldoni, has succeeded in rewriting a part of Italian theatrical history: I am of course referring to Massimo Castri."
– Antonio Latella

by
Carlo Goldoni

director
Antonio Latella

with
Sonia Bergamasco
Marta Cortellazzo Wiel
Ludovico Fededegni
Giovanni Franzoni
Francesco Manetti
Gabriele Pestilli
Marta Pizzigallo
Valentino Villa

dramaturgy
Linda Dalisi

sets
Annelisa Zaccheria

costumes
Graziella Pepe

music and sound
Franco Visioli

lights
Simone De Angelis

assistant director
Marco Corsucci

production
Teatro Stabile dell'Umbria

 

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