Hamlet at Farnese Theater

Giuseppe Di Stefano

Hamlet performed by the «mad» who frees the mind

Can this absolute masterpiece, infinitely investigated, updated, deconstructed, contaminated, still offer itself unpublished and unexplored in its exploration and give us further meaning? Never has a depiction of Hamlet been as destabilizing to our senses as this one by Lenz Rifrazioni.

With this work, retranslated into conceptual and thematic nodes to derive a new expressiveness, the long theatrical research conducted by the Parma-based company reaches a disconcerting result of dramatic rewriting on borderline bodies in which the boundary between love, madness, and death finds further meaning. Human and artistic. Embodying Shakespeare's words, inhabiting them with an emotional, personal, and unique adherence, which is innervated in the mental and physical fabric of the “sensitive” actors themselves, directed by Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, are a group of former mental patients from the Colorno asylum and now guests of Pellegrino Parmense's therapeutic-rehabilitation community.

Tommaso Chimenti

Lenz's Hamlet: Irrational and Metaphysical

Actors and former mental health patients at the Farnese Theatre in Parma

Let's start from the equation Hamlet equals Christ. Let's start like a bomb at the market. Like gas in a souk. Hamlet, an orphaned son only to have to face power, abuse, the affections that have turned their backs on him, madness, not being believed, having to become a spokesperson and a banner and revenge at the hands of his father. Jesus sent to earth to be believed to be the son of God, an impossible operation, to bring the father's verb, to avenge with deeds the unheard precepts of the parent, to give the new way, to traverse, even with blood, the new earth. Hamlet is also Jesus in a dazzling image that Lenz prepares in the underground rooms of the Pilot's Palace, where two split Hamlets stand like thieves on either side of an empty and deserted cross (…)

Third time in three years that the Parma-born Lenz Rifrazioni, aka the director, set and costume designer Maria Federica Maestri and the playwright and photographer Francesco Pititto, have staged Shakespeare's masterpiece with actors who are former mental patients of the Colorno Psychiatric Hospital, alongside their historic actress, Barbara Voghera, a girl suffering from Down syndrome, charged with an acting force, of an exceptional and impetuous emotional control and vocal expressiveness (…) The journey (difficult to manage the movement of sixty spectators per performance, kudos to the professionalism of all the employees), because it is literally itinerant, and it is a crossroads in the meanders of the Palazzo della Pilotta, passing through the National Gallery and flowing into the Farnese Theatre, like being inside the entrails of the protagonist, in his clouded thoughts, in the echoes that are lost, in the incomprehensible footsteps, in his occluded veins, in his most lacerating and doubtful nightmares, in his deviant intestines, falling, searching in the darkness without light, in the mists that do not allow us to see clearly, to understand, to find our place in the world.

E’ a Hamlet in brief where they matter more than the sentences, the words, where they remain imprinted more than the hands, the eyes that pierce, break through, pierce the theatre and make ground, concrete, there and now, demanding accountability, responsibility, questions. They have glassy eyes and slowed movements but they are explosive and electric, ironic and concentrated, dense and intense: Delfina is Ophelia, Giovanni, the theoretician and intellectual of the group, is Laertes, Enzo, Paolo, Barbara are just as many Hamlets in a continuous exchange of person, between fantasy and dream, Frank is Queen Gertrude (…) Catacombs and dungeons, alleys and alleys in the minutiae of ancient words, here renewed, in the pompous grandeur of an artistic past, here in dim light, like a world in decay, outside and inside us (…).

Valeria Ottolenghi

«Hamlet» of Lenz: «sensitive» actors at the Farnese Theatre

Immediately of notable charm, a vision/listening that enchants, the first part of the show, which takes place on the monumental staircase leading to the entrance of the Farnese Theatre, where some intense, clear, vast images are projected, while the first dialogue takes place remotely, the following audience, an itinerant creation, for subsequent stops: they have arrived in the spaces of the Pilotta, after the Rocca di San Secondo and the Royal Palace of Colorno, l’ Hamlet by Lenz Rifrazioni, with a text that reworks Shakespeare's work by absorbing, mixing life experiences of «sensitive actors», in new trails of meaning and emotion. And the dimension of power multiplies with the royal couple placed on the stage of the Farnese Theatre, while Hamlet will go approaching his mother along that catwalk which will later go through Ophelia to go and die in the water…of great effectiveness, a special density of interpretative values and disturbances, the scenes in this magnificent space, just as the subsequent passage in the dim light under the steps seems to take on echoes of psychoanalytic excavation: the central scenes, inside some rooms of the Pinoteca, seemed more dispersive, especially compared to Colorno's unforgettable staging. Screens, projections, roles multiplied by this Hamlet, translation, dramaturgy, imagoturgy by Francesco Pititto, direction, sets, costumes by Maria Federica Maestri, performers Liliana Bertè, Franck Berzieri, Giovanni Carnevale, Guglielmo Gazzelli, Paolo Maccini, Luigi Moia, Delfina Rivieri, Vincenzo Salemi, Elena Varoli, Barbara Voghera, music by Andrea Azzali/Monophon. Everydayness of words and disconcerting depths of disorientation coexist wonderfully, even leaving room, in some passages, for smiles (…).

Andrea Pocosgnich

Lenz's Hamlet Refractions: Judgment and Its Crisis

The first steps in the Palazzo della Pilotta immediately weigh down the grandeur that surrounds us, on the stairs leading to the theatre two actors welcome us, on the left we understand that Hamlet (Paolo Maccini) is there, neutral, he does not express an emotion, he will be his natural mask for the entire show, on the right Barbara Voghera, she is Hamlet too, but her interpretation is diametrically opposed to the first: She literally climbs onto the syllabification of Francesco Pititto's rewrite, struggling with all her strength against the pronunciation impediments that Down syndrome would impose on her; she will search her little body for a resonance modulated by continuous contractions. The first projected videos (in which the ghost of the father also appears) will be shown on the balcony, but they will be numerous and will welcome the viewer into every space, characterizing the entire scenic writing of Maria Federica Maestri. This Hamlet has always been nomadic, in the internal path of the show and in the perennial search for unusual spaces where one can install one's emotions and contradictions. After the Rocca dei Rossi and the Royal Palace of Colorno, the collaboration between the institutions and the company has given us this small and fragile utopia of the Farnese area, unfortunately dissolved an evening early due to the Emilian earthquake.

Renzo Francabandera

The Hamlet of Lenz Refractions

At the end of May, a particularly delicate event in an enchanting setting in the city of Parma

The resumption of the Hamlet in Lenz Rifrazioni is an event in its own way. After the productions at the Rocca dei Rossi in San Secondo (2010) and at the Royal Palace of Colorno (2011), Lenz re-proposed his reinterpretation of Shakespeare's classic directed by Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto, in the last week of May inside the splendid setting of the Teatro Farnese in Parma. On an annual basis, therefore, this experiential itinerary takes viewers on a journey of confrontation with others, both within themselves and with the fragile self that we most difficultly accept. The heart of this work, even the dramatic writing and the deepest intimacy the production exudes, is due to the participation, as actors, of some of the guests of the Rehabilitation Therapeutic Community, an experience that began over ten years ago in collaboration with the Department of Mental Health of the Local Health Authority of Parma.