Eighteenth-century farce, Neapolitan tradition and Shakespearean evocations: it's the Hamlet of Punta Corsara, staged at the Bellini Theater in Naples
Funny, tragicomic and true to the right point the original version of Hamlet rewritten and reworked by Punta Corsara, a theater company formed thanks to a training project born in the Scampia district with the aim of giving young people an opportunity for redemption through the art of theater. Today, after about five years, Punta Corsara is now a pearl of the Italian theater scene thanks to the extreme skill of its actors, Giuseppina Cervizzi, Christian Giroso, Vincenzo Nemolato, Valeria Pollice, Gianni Vastarella, and the talent of the director and performer Emanuele Valenti. Hamlet Travestie of Punta Corsara will be on stage until March 13 at the Bellini Theater in Naples.
Hamlet is an immense work, in which one can dive into, among its verses and its atmospheres, and come up with infinite meanings that can be revived and recontextualized, in a demonstration of the universal value that probably belongs to this classic text and few others in the world. To face Hamlet, especially in the present era, is never a simple mission, but rather a continuous challenge, which puts the director and performers to the test, with the risk of trivializing the work and falling into the “already said”.
A challenge that has not discouraged Punta Corsara who, on the contrary, took the opportunity to propose us a version of contemporary Hamlet close to our daily Neapolitan reality, taking out jokes, situations and characters not only from Shakespeare's text but, above all, from the eighteenth-century rewriting with a burlesque taste of John Poole, from which the title is taken Hamlet Travestie, And from Don Fausto di Antonio Petito, parody, in turn, of the Faust of Goethe.
Hence the smooth, pleasant and semi-serious tale of a Neapolitan family of our times, the Barilotto, a ramshackle family unit that earns its living with a market stall with which it tries to pay off its debts with Don Gennaro, the boss of the area. Six characters that evoke, in their roles and in their stories, the six main characters of Hamlet Shakespeare: the mother Amalia / Gertrude, widow of her husband who died in a mysterious accident, Uncle Salvatore / Claudio, the family friend Don Liborio / Polonio, his sons Ornella / Ophelia e Ciro / Laertes. And then there is Hamlet, the only character who really bears the name of the Shakespearean protagonist and who was shocked by the tragic death of his father. Two aspects that suggest him to the point of convincing himself that he is condemned to the same fate as the prince of Denmark.
The strange taciturn behavior of Hamlet, really torn by pain, leads him to alienate himself from reality and to dissociate himself from the rest of the family, dragging himself, in his movements on stage, wrapped in a colorful plaid blanket.
In an attempt to recover the young man from the shock caused by the serious bereavement, the family relies on Don Liborio, known as' O Professor for his sagacity and intelligence in resolving situations. It will be he, the "Polonius" of the situation, to hold the reins of the story and to pull the "strings" of the other characters, convincing them to put on a play inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet, where everyone will have a very specific role (which he is already playing unconsciously), with the aim of providing the boy with a healthy shock that makes him feel better ...
The show takes place, therefore, on three levels of interpretation which inevitably end up constantly getting confused: the reality of things (the Barilotto family); the unconscious evocation of the Shakespearean characters (which is determined above all in the mind of the spectator), and the conscious representation of Hamlet himself which triggers a series of metatheural mechanisms.
Between singular farcical skits, forgotten and invented jokes, exaggerated gestures, improvised ghosts, and a language that includes the different gradients of expression of the Neapolitan dialect, the actors of Punta Corsara generate an engaging and tight rhythm until the end of the "farce" and the revelation of theatrical mechanisms.
In the end, when everything seems to be solved, without murders and bloody revenge, a dead man will really be there. This is the boss Don Gennaro, the only real enemy of the Barilotto family, killed by Hamlet in an attempt to remedy the family crisis situation. They will all, inevitably, be punished with forced exile from the city, while Hamlet will be forced to be locked up in a prison, this time real and not metaphorical, which will lead the young man to evoke, once again, the verses of the Bard: “Denmark is a prison. A vast prison, in which there are many cells, rooms and dungeons: and Denmark is one of the worst ".
