On stage at the Bellini Theater in Naples the show "A pure formality" based on the homonymous film by Giuseppe Tornatore
From the cinema screen to the theatrical scene, as often happens for many masterpieces in film translated into "flesh and blood" theater. To become a theatrical version is the famous film by the director Giuseppe Tornatore A pure formality, defined by himself his best cinematographic work, made in 1994 and starring Gérard Depardieu, Roman Polanski and Sergio Rubini.
To take care of the direction of the show, which was staged yesterday at the Bellini Theater of Naples, is Glauco Mauri, staged in the role of the Commissioner, while the part of the writer Onofrio is interpreted by a masterful Roberto Sturno. In a scenic realization that has nothing to envy to the potential of film language.
The story takes place in a dark and distressing night police station, which seems far from time and space. Time is punctuated by the sound of incessant rain. Some human figures emerge from the darkness. They belong to some policemen who have just managed to stop a madman running under the storm, as if fleeing from something. The man is taken to the police station, where he is frightened and disoriented by a Commissioner who initially proves to be unfriendly and harsh in his manner. But few questions are enough to find out that the fugitive is a famous novelist, Onofrio, the most loved by the same Commissioner who does not hesitate, therefore, to soften his attitude towards him and to welcome him in the best way, offering him dry clothes and clean. Left alone on stage to change, the public is not enough to notice that the man's shirt is bloodied, and that he does not know what happened in the last hours.
When it seems that the atmosphere is one of the most relaxed, the Commissioner asks him some usual questions, those he himself calls "A pure formality". But Onofrio begins not to remember anything, neither his own identity, nor for what reason he found himself running in the woods, offering continuously different versions of his day.
In the squalid police station it is, in fact, carrying out a strange and disturbing interrogation of a man suspected of killing a person, dead a few meters from his country house. A man who has obvious problems with memory, but most probably just because "Men are eternally condemned to forget the unpleasant things in their lives; and the more they are unpleasant and first they prepare to forget them ". As he himself states in one of his novels.
And nothing will be needed photographs, phone calls, steps and quotes from the books written by Onofrio himself, to remind him of the details of that tragic night where everything may have happened. The Commissioner's questions become the real protagonists of the drama, and will inevitably lead the protagonist and the spectator to a single unpredictable ending. That will explain why in that unreal room the clock hand is still motionless, as the perspective never seems so unreal, the reason why the pens have no ink to write and for which the phone has no line.
A surprise ending that the skilled Commissioner had probably already understood from the beginning and that leads us to question ourselves on the mysterious journey of life ...
The show will be on stage at Bellini Theater of Naples until 22 March 2015. For information on tickets and timetables see our dedicated article.
