Silvio Orlando – one of the most acclaimed and award-winning actors in Italian theatre and cinema – takes on a role by Luigi Pirandello for the first time, playing the scribe Ciampa, a tragic and grotesque figure who is the beating heart of The Rattlecap, here in Andrea Baracco’s production.

Five years after writing the novella La Verità, Luigi Pirandello – awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 – adapted it into the two-act play Il berretto a sonagli, the Sicilian version of which, crafted for Angelo Musco, premiered in 1917 at the Teatro Nazionale in Rome. In one of the letters addressed to Musco, in which he questioned the merits of the play and its protagonist, Ciampa, Pirandello describes him as a character “brimming with tragic humanity, not alive but intensely alive”.
In his director’s notes, Andrea Baracco states: “Ciampa’s humility looms large, the ridiculous drags him down; it is as if an inexorable blade were cutting ever deeper into his chest, to reveal his heart, and so he defends himself with vivid and heart-rending words. He begins his journey with a simplicity that allows him to display comic aspects, an ironic humour with which he mercilessly mocks the obtuseness of others, only to plunge, in his humiliation as the vanquished, into a sort of lyrical exaltation that constantly shifts the audience from laughter to anguish”.