The Orchids of Pippo Delbono at the Bellini Theater in Naples [Review]

Pippo Delbono brings to the Bellini Theater in Naples a show that represents a hymn to life, with the desire to stop time and deliver it to eternity

Orchids are "evil" flowers . You can never tell the real ones from the fake ones. Yet they are beautiful, colorful, all different, like human beings, like each of our lives.

This is one of the foundations from which Pippo Delbono begins to create his new show. The source of inspiration that has allowed him to craft a varied and engaging stage score, composed of musical pieces, more or less well-known plays, films, and moments of reflection one-on-one with the audience, which represents a true hymn to life, starting with death ...

That of his mother, beloved by him, who left an immense void in his life. A void that the director and actor tries to fill in all ways, relying on art, and transmitting the joy of living from the stage.

Pippo Delbono welcomes spectators into the theater with one hope: to "make the audience dance along with the actors ." He does so through a language that abandons words and verbs, adopting a more engaging physical and sensory language , made up of real noises, real contact with the people seated in the audience, and the exposure of the naked bodies of the actors on stage, who do nothing but reveal themselves and their very personalities, in a close union between art and life. Leaving the audience disoriented, disoriented, yet enchanted by the explosion of life unfolding before their eyes.

Orchidee can be considered a true tribute to a loved one who is no longer with us, a funeral wake for a dying mother also realized through the (at times crude) images of her real agony in the hospital, but made tender and moving by the love that Delbono himself shows towards her by caressing her hands and face.

As in all his shows, Delbono brings on stage a cast of "real" people, a cast which also includes social outcasts, such as the deaf-mute Bobò, who lived in an asylum for forty years, and Gianluca, a down boy who he masterfully interprets characters full of life, thrilling the spectators. People "removed" from the society to which Delbono returns the magic of life through the art of theater, alternating their "performances" with their own voiceover to dialogue with the public, tell private stories, associations of ideas, memories, famous quotes theatrical and musical that live a new life here.

Orchidee is, in fact, a true collage of lyrics and music , musical pieces from Pietro Mascagni, Enzo Avitabile, Deep Purple, Miles Davis, and Philip Glass, and theatrical verses from Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet) and Chekhov, whose common thread is a passion for life. Up until the poignant finale of The Cherry Orchard.

Can the void left by loss, death be filled? Can the only possible world be made livable? This is the question that Delbono asks us at the beginning of the show. Which was born thanks to the desire to capture time and allocate it to eternity, a bit like we all do when we take pictures with our mobile phone, to immortalize moments that we will never live again.

The theater here returns to its original role: that of desperately finding meaning in life. To continue, despite everything, to talk about love.