Circus Equestre Sgueglia It is one of the most famous plays of the famous Neapolitan playwright, actor and poet Raffaele Viviani, which will revive on the stage of the Naples Theater Festival 2013 thanks to the review of the Argentine director Alfredo Arias.
The two theater masters, although belonging to two distant generations, share a “circus” experience that explains Arias's choice of this text.
Raffaele Viviani, at a young age, he was in fact hired by a circus manager to earn those few cents a day that allowed him and his family to live after his father's death, thus starting his career in the theater from the bottom step. His experience marked him to the point of wanting to remember it in 1922 in his comedy Circus Equestre Sgueglia.
Alfredo Arias, Argentinian national French director, leads in world premiere at Naples Theater Festival this text because, as he himself remembers, in the abandoned land in front of his childhood home "One day a very poor circus arrived, without even a big top, but only patched fabrics". Between flights of acrobats and sad animals that inhabited this desolate landscape in Arias seemed to witness the desperation of life itself.
Circus Equestre Sgueglia reinterpreted by Arias puts us in front of a game of mirrors. The ups and downs of a family that owns a circus becomes the metaphor of a poor and precarious world. Between the spectacle and the grotesque atmospheres of huts, jousting and trapezoids
“Viviani drags us into a double game. A game that we must imagine - that of circus representation - and one we are witnessing - that of life. She chooses to highlight the love affairs. She tells us that there is no possible refuge: even the circus, conceived as a last shelter, is exposed to the vertigo of passion and its inhabitants can be expelled from it at any time to sink into the greatest of solitudes ".
In Naples, Arias selected his cast of actors and musicians and, immersed in the depths of Neapolitan life, he sought and found the spirit that led Viviani to the creation of this famous text:
“I have always been struck by the desperate poetry I hear in the streets of Naples, a mixture of great lyricism and anguish, the same that I find in Viviani's text. Naples can never leave you indifferent, it is a sort of absolute experience and if Viviani's words are still so strong today it is because they are authentic daughters of these places "
Information on the Circo Equestre Sgueglia show
When: from 21 to 23 June 20 hours: 00
Price tickets:
- Full price: € 25
- Reduced under 25 / over 56: 15 euro
Where: San Ferdinando Theater, Piazza Eduardo del Filippo 20, Naples (Google Maps)
