"Bringing Back the Essential Meaning of the Theatre": Harold Pinter and the Belarus Free Theatre

The Belarus Free Theatre was founded in 2005 by Belarusian playwright and journalist Nikolai Khalezin and theatre producer Natalia Koliada. It is a dissident company which opposes the totalitarian regime of Lukashenko; therefore, in Belarus it must work underground. In 2005 the Belarus Free Theatre invited Tom Stoppard to Minsk. During his visit he warmly suggested that they stage Pinter's plays: "It seems to me it's yours." After working on Pinter's plays, they eventually came up with an original production: Being Harold Pinter.In my essay I delineate how, in Being Harold Pinter, Pinter's works are shown under the reinvigorating new light of an urgent political theatre. I also discuss how the Belarus Free Theatre found a symbolic, essential and critical artistic language by which, "they are bringing back the essence meaning of the theatre," as Pinter remarked

Textual Editing and Diversity: Shakespeare’s Richard III as a Case Study

This conversation explores the big questions that are re-defining how scholars approach the editing of Shakespeare’s works in our historical moment, from who gets to edit Shakespeare to how they choose to represent the Shakespearean text to their readers. Shakespeare has traditionally been edited by white, male scholars trained in prestigious academic institutions in the Anglo-world. What happens when women and BIPOC scholars, or scholars whose first language is not English, get to edit Shakespeare? And what happens when editors approach the task of re- editing Shakespeare for a more diverse readership? By using examples drawn from Shakespeare’s Richard III, this conversation shows how differently this history play can be edited and how differently it can be made to mean for new generations of readers, students, and theatre-goers

Regia e romanzo tra XX e XXI secolo. Due sguardi (per un’introduzione)

Questo saggio introduttivo si concentra sui possibili esiti della ricerca sui rapporti tra il teatro e il romanzo in un secolo dominato dalla figura del regista. Prima di introdurre i saggi, i curatori presentano due prospettive differenti ma complementari: la prima si concentra sull'autorialità del regista , la seconda propone un'analisi del recente fenomeno della romanzizzazione della drammaturgia contemporane

“Garibaldi Vs Shakespeare: l'eroe sulla scena di Londra (1859-1864)”, in British Risorgimento. Roma e l'Italia nello sguardo degli scrittori di lingua inglese

Questo volume è parte della ricerca nazionale “British Risorgimento”: Rappresentazioni e interazioni britanniche nel processo di unificazione nazionale italiana”, diretta da Lilla Maria Crisafulli. Vi è presa in esame sia la rilevanza accordata al Risorgimento italiano (che circoscriviamo tra il 1815 e il 1870) dalla cultura britannica nel suo complesso – e quanto questo abbia ravvivato anche il dibattito interno circa la definizione della Englishness – sia la rappresentazione che gli autori di lingua inglese fornirono della realtà di Roma e dello Stato Pontificio

Tutto è segno

Il controverso rapporto tra blackface e interpretazion

“And thus I clothe my naked villainy”: Richard III and the Deformed Body as Rhetorical Camouflage in Thomas Ostermeier’s Production

Abstract: If the royal body exists to be looked at and acquires its meaning only when it is exposed, then in Thomas Ostermeier’s staging and screening of Shakespeare’s Richard III we have this principle exhibited to its extreme. Taking examples from Ostermeier’s production, I show that what should get our attention, instead, is Richard’s skillful use of the voice and his speaking ability to seduce and manipulate his audience. Since the very beginning of the performance, there is no intention to mask Richard’s renowned hunchback and, on the contrary, it is soon laid bare as a fake: it is just a piece of theatrical makeup. It is mainly through his rhetoric that he builds the performing kind of body he considers useful for the specific purpose he intends to attain. During its run at the 69th Avignon festival, Richard III was filmed and broadcast for the first time on 13 July 2015 on ARTE France, and since then it has been possible to watch for it on different occasions till the Schaubühne broadcast from its own website on 3 April 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the article, I therefore also focus my attention on the issue of presence and participation of the audience in the “liveness” of the remediation and I consequently deal with the different temporalities implied in the theatre production and in its recorded version