"Remember with anger" at the Bellini Theater: the "anger" of yesterday and today according to Luciano Melchionna [Review]
“Remember with anger” by John Osborne at the Bellini Theater in Naples. A 1956 show about the generation of “angry young people”, which heralded our times
Three young people spend a tedious and gray Sunday afternoon in a small attic packed with household appliances. I'm Jimmy Porter and his friend Cliff, who try to deceive the time by reading and commenting on news in a newspaper, ed Alison, Jimmy's wife, who does nothing but iron and empty washing machines.
After this static initial scene Jimmy Porter he begins to complain and get angry, to argue about any aspect of his life and the world around him. Nothing for Jimmy Porter goes like he has to go. He married a wife that he loves but that he considers "cowardly" and unable to do everything, even to think, and he never misses an opportunity to remind her. His friend Cliff, the only one he has left, is insignificant and annoying. His work is unbearable. He has a sweet stall in the market, with his friend and roommate Cliff, but any excuse seems good for wanting to leave everything, without wanting to start over. The friend of his wife Alison, Helena, she is a snobbish and superficial woman who he hates more than anything else, especially when she decides to become the new roommate. Her house, their house, is a "den" obtained from one attic / warehouse of an electrodomestic shopi, where they are forced to live among washing machines, refrigerators and scrap metal. The only home that they can afford given the economic precariousness they are forced to.
A contemporary drama? No, it's the show staged by Luciano Melchionna and based on a famous 50's English comedy by John Osborne, Look back in anger, Remember angrily (at the Bellini Theater until December 15), but that may have been written yesterday.
For two hours we are witnessing the dialogues of these four young people, but above all the angry monologues by Jimmy Porter, who throws his words full of anger against the whole world, against the arrogance and hypocrisy of the society of the time, against a constant condition of precariousness, bewilderment, and lack of prospects. Some sentences contain the sense of her irrational and furious anger, her frustration and his suffering: “Why has the past stolen all our passions?”, “Why don't we play a game? Let's pretend that we are human and that we are alive. Just for a while. What do you think?".
Jimmy's anger is the rage of allthe. It is the anger of their past and our present, of those like Jimmy "was born in an era that is not his ", and is accused of indifference towards everything and everyone, even towards those who love.
Look back in anger became the manifesto of the generation of "angry young people". But he foretold our times, those of those who are still not satisfied with their lives today, of those who do not see a future on the horizon, of those who are forced to give up their desired life to make it to the end of the month, putting aside dreams and hopes. .
We are all Jimmy Porter, we are all helpless, tired and bored. We all have a great desire to scream, to wake up others, but mainly ourselves, from the indifference in which we have fallen.
Daniele Russo e Stefania Rocca I'm still on stage at Teatro Bellini within Remember with rabbia by Luciano Melchionna (Here info on dates, times and prices)