Staging your own play ten years after writing it is, in a sense, a bit like working on another author’s play. A stranger with whom one shares a few biographical details and a few memories.
The desire to do this came to me because, in recent years, I’ve seen many plays that have addressed the theme of immigration and recounted the massacres in the Mediterranean— some of them very effective and moving—but all based on a reality in which we Italians/Europeans/Westerners are trapped in the dichotomy of “border-builders” versus “rescuers.”
*Sorry, We Didn’t Die at Sea* starts from an opposite premise; it isn’t realistic, it doesn’t take a “direct” political approach, and it doesn’t strike emotional chords tied to the present. To all intents and purposes, I’d say it’s about something else—another kind of emigration, other dynamics, and another theme—which I believe has more to do with the relationship between the passage of time and the image we manage to form of ourselves, as social beings, within this continuous natural change.
As a director, I therefore chose to push this departure from reality even further, toward the surreal and the archetypal, using the rotating set design to emphasize the passage of time and dividing the stage action into oblique cinematic shots, in which the audience should be led to feel unbalanced—not only visually but also in terms of their social and moral judgment of what they see.
I therefore believe that the challenge of balancing realistic acting within a symbolic stage setting—a feature that links this production to the latest works I have staged—also takes on a meta-historical significance on this occasion.