| 
aunts
Written and Direct Laura SICIGNANO
Scenes and Customs Andrea TADDEI
Music Andrea CECCON
Light Fabio PARODI
with
Madame Prémière - Riccardo Croci
Madame Seconde - Maurizio Sguotti
Madame Troisième - Massimiliano Caretta
Madame Dérnière - Marco Pasquinucci
In order to distinguish them, they were called
by numbers: Madame Prémière, Madame Seconde, Madame
Troisième, Madame Dérniére.
Nobody speaks about the Aunts , the daughters of King Louis 15th
, in the pages of French history. They were soon swallowed up into
the darkness of memory, overwhelmed by much more important characters.
Their story lasts one night, in a French Revolution's prison.
Many erotic, mostly dissimulated references come to their mind:
it is as if the Aunts constantly had a slip of the tongue with sex
implications. The author fishes for atmospheres and for words from
De Sade, Molière, Laclos, vintage essays, philosophers from
the Enlightenment, reports of scandals, biographies, and then she
loses the threads of these sources, mixing everything together,
adding new inventions, gossip heard and seen in the street, in offices.
She forms the characters on the skin and voices of the actors with
whom she works, as director. The piéce is en travesti. There
are the The Maids by Genet, there is Copi, there is a talk in 'Zie'
of missed femininity.
Furthermore, artifice is one of the main themes of this work: the
Eighteenth century was a time of artifices, a century based on rationality
behind which monsters - featuring masks, tricks, affected manners,
etiquette - would hide, which, in turn, would conceal cruel power
games and unbreakable roles: four men playing the roles of four
women, who, in turn, play a drama made of deceit and masks and which
reflects itself in a play of deceiving mirrors. In the end, everybody
is dazzled, they are all victims and executioners at the same time.
Isn't all this topical? Isn't this cruel power game between the
Aunts a topical issue? Isn't the subtle cruelty of a continuous
masquerade terrible? Some sort of cruelty which is not based on
buckets of blood thrown onto the audience, but rather on subtle
stiletto strokes.
The backbone is based on the four most important episodes in the
life of Madame Du Barry, the Lover of King Louis 15th, who is the
Aunts' father.
Each sister will then take turns playing the role of Madame Du Barry's
nemesis.
In between these "pieces", trait d'union passages are
inserted to improve the colour and to paste the whole work together.
The intention is also to revive the atmosphere of those times, with
a sort of propensity for documentary, cataloguing work, while evoking
a nostalgic feeling for a time which is coming apart in the very
hands of the Aunts: therefore, court parties, banquets ä a
decadent and kitsch taste.
Generally, comic moments are followed by dramatic ones, in a contrast
fashion, following a jerky and zig-zagging progress which is expected
to catch the public unaware.
All the actors are always on stage, and all strongly feel their
individual responsibility; they can never lower their guard. Despite
their differences, the Aunts are all slices of the same apple. Much
work is done with the actors on the relations between characters,
on different shades and fluctuations of fear, hatred, grudge, the
awareness of imminent death, feelings of repression, gossip as a
'lid' to harness terror.
From the unity of time and space, bitter splinters of memory shoot
off.
For just one night, the Aunts live again the life of Madame Du Barry,
their enemy. This is a life they have never lived. They talk and
talk, to fend off their fear of death. However, death, in the morning,
knocks at the door. Now they are ready to welcome it, they have
reached the very bottom of their souls and of their mean and desperate
humanity. Just a second before they die, they are only left with
their own redemption. Sublimation.
From a higher level of meaning, every Aunt is a movement of the
cycle of matter: dissolution, revolution, combination, sublimation.
The cycle which encompasses everything. Materialism (with its roots
in the 18th century) fails to meet human expectations of transcendence,
hence the human being is forced to redeem himself through fiction.
Madame Seconde is in charge of delivering two 'philosophic' monologues:
in the first one, she sets forth a materialistic approach which
leads to nihilism. The whole character of Madame Seconde is full
of it. The monologue features quotations from 18th century philosophers
like Descartes, Hobbes etc.. Conversely, the second monologue is
historic/prophetic in nature: it begins with some images from the
Bible's Apocalypse, foreshadowing the French Revolution and, more
in general, a catastrophic and epochal upheaval. The roots of modern
thinking and atheist nihilism can thus be detected here. In Prémière's
final monologue, a shelter is pathetically looked for away from
materialism and atheist nihilism: atheism first looks like a proud
conquest of man, it then becomes a burden under which one languishes
through anguish. A sort of escape is thus looked for in fiction,
invention, without too many questions about the truth.
The story, however, at a more immediate level of perception, is
more simply the story of the Aunts, virgin Princesses who loath
the beautiful Madame Du Barry. It is the story of their power games,
of relations between characters, their hatreds and passions: at
this level the show should be understood by everybody.
Only some of the cities visited: Milano, Genoa,
Rome, Ancona, Palermo, Cosenza, Aosta, Pescara, Vercelli |
