With I miei stupidi intenti, based on the novel of the same name by Bernardo Zannoni, winner of the 2022 Campiello Prize, the VicoQuartoMazzini theatre company continues its exploration of contemporary Italian literature, delving into a world populated by animals who seek God and then reject him, who dream of being human and ultimately prefer to remain beasts.
Archy is lame. For this reason, his mother, a weasel who was widowed in the middle of winter, sold him for the paltry price of one and a half chickens. He was bought by an old fox-loan shark who will teach him how to abandon his animalistic life of hardship and cruelty. Through the revelation of words and language, Archy will be overwhelmed by the great contradiction of the human world: the awareness of death coexisting with an unbridled desire for eternity.
‘In the story of Archy and in the writing of the twenty-year-old Zannoni, there is something powerful and mystical, the force of myths and hagiographies,’ writes VicoQuartoMazzini. It is the parable of an animal that tries to get closer to God, fails, and tries again; of a creature that has the foolish intention of trying to be more than it is. [...]
We imagined a near future in which humanity has lost (or rather, destroyed) everything and finds itself with nothing but useless technology. In this mythological and post-apocalyptic scenario, a community of survivors gathers around a story, a book, a fire, and tries to make it an instrument of eternity. The story of the weasel, the parable of its life, thus becomes a primitive and contemporary song, which we listen to, obsessed, like Archy, by the big questions we cannot answer."
