Portugal – Pasolini's "Calderón" directed by Fabio Condemi
The São Luiz Teatro Municipal in Lisbon hosts the show Calderón by Pier Paolo Pasolini directed by Fabio Condemi, one of the most interesting young Italian directors, already awarded with a Ubu Prize. Condemi worked on Pasolini in 2019 too, conceiving and directing an amazing monologue inspired by Pasolini’s film scripts.
Calderón is a tragedy in verse, inspired by the 17th century author Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s masterpiece Life is a Dream. However, the atmosphere, plot and context are radically different: we are in Francoist Spain in the 1960s, amidst revolutionary awakenings and the logic of power seems to leave only room for freedom in dreams or in the paintings of Diego Velázquez. Pasolini makes a lucid and merciless x-ray of power, its way of renewing itself and staying old, its changes and strategies.
Condemi skilfully handles a labyrinthine text in which multiple levels and traces coexist in a continuous and very rich interlocking game, and in which viewers are called to question about our being in history.
The show was produced by ERT Emilia Romagna Teatro within the international project ‘Prospero Extended Theatre’, funded by the programme ‘Creative Europe’ of the European Union, and in the frame of the project How you should imagine me, a production project ERT dedicated to Pasolini on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, conceived by Valter Malosti, director, actor, and current director of ERT, together with art critic, writer, and scholar Giovanni Agosti.
Portugal is the second stage of a tour that began in Spain in February, at the Teatros Canal in Madrid. In Lisbon, Calderón is on stage at the São Luiz theatre on March 1st and 2nd (8 pm).