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

Le Orchid they 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 the lives of each of us.

It is one of the assumptions from which Delbono leaves to create his new show. The source of inspiration that allowed him to create a varied and engaging scenic score, composed of musical pieces, more or less well-known plays, films and moments of reflection face to face with the audience in the room, which represents a real own hymn to life, starting from 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.

Delbono welcomes viewers in the hall with a hope: that of "Make the audience dance with the actors", and it does so through a language that abandons the word and the "verb" through the most engaging physical language and senses, made up of real noises, of real contact with the people sitting in the stalls, through the exhibition of the naked bodies of the actors on stage who do nothing but show themselves and their own personalities, in a close union between art and life. Leaving the public bewildered, disoriented, but enchanted by the explosion of life that happens before their eyes.

Orchid it can be considered a real tribute to a loved one who is no longer there, a wake to a dying mother also realized through the images (sometimes crude) 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.

Orchid it is, in fact, a real one collage of lyrics and music, musical passages taken from Pietro Mascagni, Enzo Avitabile, Deep Purple, Miles Davis and Philip Glass, and theatrical verses taken from Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet) and from Cechov, whose fil rouge is the passion for life. Until the poignant final de 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.

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Written by Valentina D'Andrea
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