LA MORTE DELLA BELLEZZA
by Benedetto Sicca
direction Benedetto Sicca
with Mauro Lamantia, Benedetto Sicca
set design Luigi Ferrigno
costume design Zaira De Vincentiis
light design Marco Giusti
co-direction Cecilia Logorio
ph. Laura Micciarelli
production Teatro Stabile di Napoli
opening night: Teatro Stabile di Napoli January 22nd 2015
"La morte della bellezza" can not just put on stage, can not be "adapted" and can not be reduced. "La morte della bellezza" must be read. But it must be read!
It has to be read to experience the clearness and the preciousness that Peppino Patroni Griffi (calling him Giuseppe would be betray him, especially to who had met him) used to narrate Eugenio e Lilandt affair, to tell their love, to pass trough the obscenity with a noble style that made it lyrical and, above all, normal.
In fact the novel is also a dialogue between the author and a different way to live the sodomy and the homosexual love full of guilt-feelings, fears and inferiority complexes to the, so called, normal love. Through Eugenio's character - that Patroni Griffi first created for the short novel "La notte blu del tram" (1948) - the author seems to came back, after more or less forty years, to the thought that there is no shame in the moving palpitation of the disclosure of a new love, instead it is a knowledge process that brings to freedom, beauty and life. Even if the characters do not solve all the doubts and fears, the way in which Patroni Griffi describes their emotions and desires seems to talk about a review of his young-men impulses, freed from the weight of the influencing bourgeoise respectability.
Trough the theatre, in a direct dialogue with the audience, I deal with this wonderful novel of formation on the beauty of the obscenity, with the intemption to transmit the desire to read it and to dare a little sentimental speculation with who had already read it.