On the stage of the Silvano Toti Globe Theater the work of William Shakespeare "The Merchant of Venice" translated and directed by Loredana Scaramella. From Thursday 24 August until 10 September (with the exceptions of 28 August and 4 September) the mythical figures of Shylock, the merchant Antonio, Bassanio and his beloved Porzia will enliven the stage of the oval of Villa Borghese with the intricate events set between Venice and Belmonte.
During the breaks on Monday 28 August and Monday 4 September, the show conceived and directed by Melania Giglio "Sonetti d'Amore" will be back on stage, a journey through the most beautiful verses of William Shakespeare accompanied by a rich musical contamination: from Marvin Gaye to Amy Winehouse, from Leonard Cohen to Alanis Morissette.
DIRECTOR'S NOTES
In the many versions of the Merchant of Venice that I have seen, the character of Shylock, great in conception, writing and for the fascination created around him by extraordinary interpretations, has always had a central position, so much so as to often create in today's audience the misunderstanding that he is the protagonist of the work. Antonio, the Merchant of the title, has morphed into a subordinate and faded role. But the indication of Shakespeare it is different, and it is a road that deserves to be explored. Furthermore, the memory of the terrible experience of the Holocaust instinctively leads us to consider The Merchant of Venice as the starting point for a reflection on the anti-Semitic discrimination suffered on several occasions by the Jewish people, of which Shylock becomes the ideal embodiment. It is this that has accentuated in recent decades the dramatic color of the staging of a text which instead has a comedy character. The bet of our staging is to recover this character, focusing on the story of a reflection on justice, full of sharp irony on love and money, moving the setting to the years between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , which were, like the Elizabethan period, euphoric and contradictory years, full of changes of habits, novelties and luminous progress, mixed with the silent seeds of a dark future. The sea that divides Venice and Belmonte, the places of the story. A white pier glittering in the daylight houses industrious men, traders and industrialists. Sixteenth-century London, hidden behind the appearance of the lagoon city described by Shakespeare, thus moves into a fantasy Belle Epoque, with a Proustian flavor.
Belmonte takes the form of the dressing room of a great fin de siècle actress, and Porzia, forced into unwanted chastity, is a fantasist who presents herself to her suitors in ever new disguises, to create an elusive feminine, a sort of incarnation of the theater , without age or genre limit. His kingdom is that indefinite place where the timeless fantasies of perfect love are placed, seasoned with the childish game of dressing up, dance, light and sweet songs tinged with sudden tango cadences. A sensual cabaret, crossed by seemingly naive racist undertones. From the contrast between these sound atmospheres and the kletzmer motifs that accompany the more dramatic scenes, the musical texture of the comedy takes shape, which extends in its visual guise up to the early XNUMXs, when the roots of tragedy mature behind a scenario of richness and exciting madness . Venice, the place of work, and Belmonte, the cradle of love, are united by a universal glue: money, the true fuel of history. It is through money that the protagonists try to manifest and fulfill their desires, in a round in which a capital is lent by the Jew Shylock to Bassanio, thanks to the Merchant Antonio who undertakes to guarantee the loan with his flesh. It is spent by Bassanio to win over Porzia, the rich heiress of Belmonte, prize of the lottery of caskets on the basis of which he will marry, who in turn will lend her money to Bassanio to free Antonio, now bankrupt, from the risk of seeing his threat stipulated in the contract: the cutting of a pound of meat. About four hundred grams, slightly more than the weight of a heart, brought into play in a pact in which meat, money and love are confused and reveal their symbolic identity in a Freudian way, a source of conflicts, ambiguities, desires and fears. What thrusts animate the quartet of protagonists and make their capitals dance? Shylock lends his money to Antonio, his opponent by religion and professional ethics, because he hopes to buy something that is worth more to him than any other: his dignity which has been offended by Antonio and then by Lorenzo, his daughter's kidnapper Jessica, and by Jessica herself who empties his house of money and jewels, denying her religion. Antonio uses the profits of his trades to satisfy the wishes of his friend Bassanio. Friend, but certainly also beloved, the only interlocutor capable of illuminating the melancholy of the Merchant's solitude with a light that it would be hypocritical not to call love. This socially unmentionable sentiment pushes Antonio to accept the pact with Shylock, for whom he feels a deep hatred, motivated by the condemnation of usury practiced by the Jew. Behind the apparent lightness with which he accepts the contract, Antonio risks his money and his flesh for Bassanio, as if to shout his love in public without words, in a libidinal and mortal drive. Bassanio for his part pursues the dream of a love with an inverse canon: he wants to be loved, and money serves him to be more attractive as an object of love. And Porzia, as cultured and enterprising as she is, puts herself, her house and all her possessions into Bassanio's hands in order to win an inalienable right to love him.
Catastrophe or happy ending? Maybe neither. In spite of the law Shylock does not obtain justice and his money goes to fatten the coffers of the State, Antonio does not have his martyrdom, Bassanio is heading towards a turbulent marriage. Portia herself, with her excellent performance en travesti as Bellario, for herself only gains the conscience of betrayal. Belmonte's tale cannot survive without the certainty of trust, and upon returning from the trial, the island of love is transformed into a bourgeois interior, in which the balance of relations between all the veterans of the Venetian adventure are defined comically. Gone are the illusions, in the light of reality a new community can be glimpsed.
Image: Merchant Venice ®Marco Borrelli
