The Elfo / Puccini Theater dedicates the opening season to Oscar Wilde: after Obscene Acts, which tells the three processes suffered by Irish writers, and waiting for Ferdinando Bruni's (from November 21st) reading of The Ghost of Canterville, , the theatre hosts until December 10 his most famous work, L’importanza di chiamarsi Ernesto, here with the barred name and the subtitle Words are weapons.
In fact, The importance of being Earnest, where Wilde takes off his satire against a hypocritical and respectable society (he attended the premiere, in the company of his wife and his lover, while waiting for the beginning of the first of its ruinous processes, a cause that he himself purposed), has a light, fiery, brilliant and lapidary writing, in which almost every sentence becomes an aphorism that leads to laughter and at the same time to reflection, soon distracted by a rhythm of jokes and dialogue that is not leave a respite. As far as comparison is concerned, we must wait for Allan Stewart Königsberg (Woody Allen's name: here is another name that doubles, apart from the characters of the comedy) to find a writing of equal epigrammatic force, in which irony, self-irony, social and cultural satire and existential reflection are equally harmonious, flashing, and rewarding.
In the plot, rich in double names and double identities, misunderstandings and personal exchanges, as in the playful tradition of Shakespeare, Marivaux and Goldoni, Wilde does not lose opportunity to mock the myths of truth, sincerity, naturalness, honesty (with which he already played just from the title). His disenchanted realism, his, yes, frankly cynical vision of man (where man and woman should be understood), his instinctively libertarian and libertine perspective (many in the text allusions in this regard to the admired French customs and culture) push him to write a work where every character, male and female, speaks and behaves outside of any rule of bourgeois official morality, placing the hypocritical surface conformism naked. The pleasure and the fun, the money and the satisfaction of the sentimental whim of the moment, are the springs that push the characters to action, just veiled by the respect of a formal aesthetic bon ton that goes from bungling and sought after to clothing, often a topic of conversation, to the pastries to accompany tea rituals.
Ferdinando Bruni and Francesco Frongia, who together sign directorships, scenes and costumes of the show, translate and emphasize the philosophy of the text by adding layered layers of antinaturalism and scenic, inventive artifact, creating a queer, camp and pop version, in which even the actualization of the classical setting, very much practiced at theater, has once quite a precise reason for being.
Male characters, though moved by heterosexual intent, all have gestures, clothing and diction that alludes to homosexuality; the setting is shifted from the late 1800s to the era of a fantasy swinging London, where colorful costumes blend British fashion trends in the 1960s and pop degenerations of Victorian tradition; the lights look psychedelic allusions with the use, sometimes syncopated, of colored spots; constantly overacting, mixing cabarettistic accents with cartoon movements and stylizations; the scene (overall too cramped with the Shakespeare Hall's amplitude and with overexposure of all other elements) combines screenings of Wilde images on the background screen, graphically contaminated with pop elements that seem to go from Lichtenstein to La Chapelle, and, in a very pertinent way, style furnishings belonging to those sixties in which design discovered at the same time non-natural materials such as plastic and absolute creative freedom.
Crowded hall audience (including students), applause and approval booms for directors and performers, including some historical names of the Elfo Theatre, such as Elena Russo generously dressed in Gwendolen's kitsch clothes, Ida Marinelli as "locomotive" Lady Bracknell, Luca Toracca, revered in clergyman and blonde bumps, and further Giuseppe Lanino and Riccardo Buffonini in the role of the two "Ernest" (the second one favorite with the crazier character), and then again Camilla Violante Scheller (the "little" Cecilie), Cinzia Spanò ("disfigured" as Miss Prism) and Nicola Stravalaci, tasty in the double role of a waiter / butler.