Welcome to Life! Fasten your seatbelts, it's gonna be a bumpy ride! Living is scary, will we be okay in the end?
When a residential house is engulfed in flames five people are killed, three children and two women. The perpetrators are youths from the neighbourhood. The name of the small town is soon known nationwide thanks to a flurry of media reports. But the nation’s attention soon turns elsewhere to other, more pressing issues. Yet for the survivors and victims of the arson attack that fateful night will never end. The mother who leapt from a window cradling her child trying to protect the baby with her own body tells her story over and over, detailing the moment of her death. The mother of one of the perpetrators talks about the silence that enveloped her home, of her inkling that something had happened, of her doubts about her son’s guilt. A female relative who survived the fire sees the flames every day, feels the heat and smells the smoke. Each person is trapped in their memory and pain yet searches for a way to talk about what happened, yearns to meet other people and find a way to communicate.
The play is built on structures drawn from commedia dell’arte: the protagonists come from various regions of Italy and personify the stereotypical attributes associated with dell’arte characters, yet the conflict rests on twenty-first-century divisions. Venetian wealth and Sicilian poverty, the refugee crisis in Lampedusa, immigrant labour, the breakdown of the health system during the pandemic, the collapse of faith in European solidarity—these are only some of the subjects the drama raises. The story of the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975 hovers over everything like a sinister omen—this was a homophobic and political crime that smacked of wild capitalism and the fascist history of Italy and Europe.
Yet two characters seem to belong to another world entirely. These are Salvatore, the equivalent of the dell’arte Dottore and his helper, Chiara, a young girl, a character who seems to be a mix of Arlecchino and perhaps an Italian Lisbeth Salander. It is they who ultimately take one of the guests into the underworld. Who are they? Etruscan gods? Messengers of Hades? A delirious dream of Claudia, who turns out to be a doctor in a Covid unit?
The play makes a wide range of references to Italian, European, and world culture. We encounter Pier Paolo Pasolini, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Tarkovsky, Tarantino, even the opening words of the Comendatore from Mozart’s Don Giovanni and allusions to the Aeneid. The action is broken up by intermezzi—some take the form of television shows, others resemble musicals. There is also a grotesque parody of Wheel of Fortune, ending with the prize of a luxury coffin, and the performance of a medieval song that is an ode to Pluto, lord of the underworld.
In the finale the violinist dies, the bourgeoisie are ridiculed, the helpless doctors await international aid, and Chiara performs her contemporary song, which might be read as the triumph of death.
Comedy mixes with tragedy, mythology with the global problems of the twenty-first century. The Italian context turns out to be merely a costume for the challenges standing before most of the societies of the West.