Andrea De Rosa is once again collaborating with playwright Fabrizio Sinisi to bring to the stage Civil War, a production which, inspired by the Latin epic poem The Pharsalia by Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, tackles themes and questions that run through the entire history of the West: the relationship between power and violence, the collapse of institutions, and the normalisation of war as a political, moral and symbolic tool.

It is 49 BC. Julius Caesar, at the head of the army that has conquered Gaul, halts on the banks of the Rubicon, the river that marks the insurmountable boundary between military command and the law of Rome. To cross it means betraying the Republic, choosing war. When he crosses it, the political order collapses in an instant: Caesar wants to become master of the state. From that irreversible step springs a civil war that has the scale, ferocity and resonance of a world war: brother against brother, city against city, the law swept aside by force. The war that erupts has the ferocity of a world war: from Italy to Mauritania, from Greece to Egypt, it becomes a mechanism that, once set in motion, devours everything in its path. A conflict that rages across the Mediterranean, culminating in Pompey’s disastrous defeat at Pharsalus, and the transformation of the already faltering Roman Republic into a dictatorship with a single man – Caesar – in command.
“Caesar and Pompey,” says De Rosa, “thus become masks, archetypes of a violence that has marked the history of the West right up to the horrific conflicts that bloodied twentieth-century Europe. Lucan’s poetic language meets a contemporary theatrical language, lyrical yet violent, which attempts to speak directly to our own time.”