Hamlet at Rocca of San Secondo

Gianni Manzella

If Hamlet and the beautiful Ophelia split in two

The paradox about the actor moving from Hamlet. People had stopped in front of this threshold, some time ago, writing about the Death of Danton of Lenz Refractions at the palace of Colorno, a ducal residence transformed into a mental asylum and later becoming one of the symbols of the’ institution denied in the battles led by Franco Basaglia.

What are for us those characters who fret over passions that are foreign to us. And we have to think again, today that the decades-long artistic journey that led Lenz to meet a group of elderly former mental patients from Colorno comes to the test of Hamlet's «madness». Almost inevitably, out of necessity before fate.

Franco Pititto has developed a poetic rewrite of Shakespeare's drama – we can read the words in the publication that accompanies the staging, highly refined as is customary for the Parma ensemble.

Along with Federica Maestri, they cut it into a series of scenes that drag viewers through the once-sumptuous rooms of the Rocca dei Rossi, a dilapidated 16th-century manor drowned in the autumn mists of the lower Po Valley. Like a parallel action, images pass over the walls or on monitors that expand the action, recovering the memory of the trials of the work, as if to say other moments of life. To further distance an identification already made problematic by the denial of roles. There will be three interpreters of Hamlet, often on stage at the same time, and two different Ophelias, while Gertrude will have a heavy male body under her black veil. In reality, we shouldn't talk about interpreters; we are, in fact, actors (transducers of force, the architects call them, for some reason). Summoned to lead the spectators behind them.

But now those beautiful words are gone. They disappear from the memory of the actors, impossible to act. Because it's a matter of life here and not acting. To be and not to pretend, or to be even in the fiction of customs that denote a sensibility, rather than an era. What we find instead is an Ophelia who evokes with a sort of ironic but also painful lightness a beauty perhaps possessed in her youth, trying to awaken the attention of a Laertes lost in a world of silent amazement – patience, she repeats with sly coquetry, patience. Or another one lying in an odalisque pose mixes fairy tales and ends up inside the events of Snow White. A king Claudius praying with the prayers he learned in childhood. This is where the miracle or alchemical transformation takes place, you choose. It's as if another, truly an Ur-Hamlet, were being written on the schedule of that first text (that's what the dazzling creation that took inspiration from Franco Scaldati's Sicilian-language writing, about ten years ago, one of the great wasted inventions of our theatre, was called). A text made of silences, of sudden and improvised gestures, of words that arise only when they are said. Which does not erase the other but questions us about what it means to us. And here we also play with the mastery of the two architects who do nothing to impose a coercive adherence to their stage writing but bend it to meet those bodies: here is also the absolute distance from many willing experiences of theatrical work with people «disabled», incapable of escaping the norm of acting.

Massimo Marino

Hamlet of Lenz: Bodies from the Underworld of Madness

“I here, or I not here” is Hamlet's strange translation that throws “being or not being” from the heavens of metaphysics into the hell of the reality of bodies. They contrast the solemn and collected environments of the Rocca dei Rossi in San Secondo with the humble, modest, ferocious reality of the actors of Lenz Rifrazioni who try to embody the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark without managing to hide their urgency as people imprisoned for years in a mental asylum and then, with the Basaglia law, freed, entrusted to reception facilities, that is, branded with the label of down and instead there committed to demonstrating the moving utmost precision in battle with the solemn and cast words of the most famous theatrical text of all time. Ringing and tangled voices under the skies of mythological, fantastic, fairytale frescoes, with knights, demons and dragons, heraldic insignia and cherubs, animals, goddesses, heroes and heroines (…).

The show, Hamlet, begins at the foot of the Rocca steps and, as in other creations by Lenz, winds through the breathtaking environments of this country monument which hosted, according to Vasari, a Parmigianino fleeing Parma dedicated to mysterious experiments in alchemy. The actors set off wearing Shakespeare's words, in the translation that displaces stereotypes and verbal facilitations to highlight the dark points or illuminate the text's screeching. Then, little by little, they lose them and find them again, bringing out their way of being, their “here” contrasted by that continuous “not here” that has been illness, madness, confinement, separation from the world, the tiring return, old age, in tension with a text imbued with political madness. Hamlet splits or triples over various bodies, in Barbara's small, ringing one, in Paolo Maccini's banal, everyday words rich in the charm of lowland barroom affabulation, in Enzo Salemi's overflowing, peaceful one.

Behind the dark wood of the Council Chamber, beneath a Bellerophon on Pegasus battling a Chimera spewing fire, the specter, in flesh and video, becomes Guglielmo Gazzelli's frowning, toothless, terrible expression, like a nightmare emerging from the underworld of madness, reproduced on the wall as a corpse in a black-and-white filmed morgue. Polonius will be another very old old man, almost immobile, unable to produce the goods of the text, words, words, words, comically hidden behind a door uprooted from the wall to spy on Hamlet, in the guise of Luigi Moia. Everyone is changed in a pale lunar mood, dressed in black with basketball shoes, the actors and the characters, among paintings and frescoes that evoke other metamorphoses, mythological and fable-like, Apuleius and Aesop.

We then see the spectre again, with a beautiful directorial invention, in the role of King Claudius, the usurper, the murderer of his brother, his uncle, the other father, master of the fragile protagonist. Terrible intolerance erupts in this actor-character drawn to a pressing, always angry rhythm, while a resigned sweetness and abandonment shines through in close-ups of Liliana Bertè's queen on video, in various rooms, embodied in a bulky Franck Berzieri en travesti con veletta. Laertes (Mauro Zumino) appears or disappears from some scene (the actors, we were told, in some cases did not make it to the end of a long, demanding work process).

Ophelia makes her heart skip a beat, with her piano spiel, with her lament “I'm young / I'm beautiful / I'm pretty / I'm nice…” as she walks away in a long loggia towards suicide with an Elizabethan-like ruff loaded by Pierrot (Delfina Rivieri, a name from another time, from a tombstone in a cemetery in the Bassa, like Ophelia), or with its springs lie lying on an uncomfortable sofa from before between empty chairs and two screens that bring back its beautiful and marked face, while with its overflowing body it repeats, slurring it, the tale of jealous beauty of Snow White (Elena Varoli) and the Hamlets are ready to transform into three gravediggers in a long, bare library, with hats and simple black dresses that project them under Beckettian skies.

These actor-characters, these men and women who break the theatrical envelopes that are supposed to contain them, opening up joyful and devastated panoramas for us, are clowns, wrecks, ghosts, inserts, in a world where Evil has become the common consciousness of “filth, vandalism”, among the voices, the too many voices pressing on our heads. They speak, slipping from the sublime to the urgency of everyday life on the brink of an apocalyptic swamp, trying, with a flash of sovereign dignity, to defend themselves “from your cowardly blows”, Fortune. Or at least to “die, sleep…”. How Hamlet's monologue still resonates, moved to the final seal of this phenomenal, thrilling adventure, in a long, solemn hall with all these toiled actors lined up for the applause of the few spectators allowed to visit their mournful rooms.

Matteo Antonaci

Being Hamlet. Aesthetics of tragedy and ethical contemplation

Hamlet is a reinterpretation of Shakespeare's tragedy that Lenz Rifrazioni carries out by focusing attention on the psychic sensitivity of the contemporary actor. Presented during the Natura Dèi Teatri festival inside the Rocca dei Rossi in San Secondo, the show marks the culmination of a journey the theater group embarked on in 2000, collaborating with the Department of Mental Health of the Parma Local Health Authority. If Cute is the thematic node around which the fifteenth edition of the Parma festival revolves, the very physicality of former long-term mental patients from the Colorno asylum becomes a gateway and key to the stratification of the tragic feeling preserved in Hamlet. In a fragmented scene inside the various rooms that make up the Rocca, built in 1466 by Pier Maria Rossi, the interpreters of the Hamlet of Lenz move. Their bodies appear as ghostly, opaque presences, oscillating between the visibility (limit/skin) of taboos on madness and the invisibility (concealment of the skin) of the institution that welcomes it. Among the magnificent frescoes of the Bolognese Mannerist school, the actors act as continuously evolving forms that are shaped from time to time taking on the appearance of the characters in the tragedy. Welcomed in the atrium of the Royal Palace, the audience follows these characters on their slow journey, constructed through the dramaturgical translation of Shakespeare's text. While on the one hand the latter remains anchored to the narrative word of the original text, on the other it borders on the absorption of the psychic/emotional feelings of the leading actors, metamorphosing into self-representation, rewriting of the self through identification with the tragic character, and therefore through the body and the techno of the theatrical material. In Hamlet, Lenz Rifrazioni addresses three different monumental entities: the Rocca dei Rossi, which acts as a fairytale castle and narrating space for the symmetries and a-symmetries of the dramaturgical text; Hamlet, one of the masterpieces of Western dramaturgy, a clay continually shaped and malleable by theatrical experimentation; and, finally, man captured in his most disturbing nature, that is, in the diversity imposed by the dominant culture. If the multiplication of the tragic plane occurs through the breaking down of the barriers that separate the representation of madness (in Shakespeare Hamlet pretends to be mad) from madness as a real existential condition, the hamlet world created by lenz refractions seems to mark the division between a normality imposed by medicine and psychology (corresponding to the viewer's gaze) and the diversity that continually justifies and testifies to the status of the beholder. While the acting figures, in their immediate recognizability, become a perfect rewriting of Shakespearean characters, the technical apparatus used in the show appears redundant. Surrounded by videos that testify to the preparatory work of the show, the actors, overexposed in their diversity, emerge as masks of a monstràre mask, where the Latin term contains the same root as the term Monère, meaning to warn. And precisely the warning of a threshold is, at heart, the highest condition of the tragic in the Hamlet of Lenz. As in the mollusk Hamlet of the Socìetas Raffello Sanzio, each individual character is trapped in their own existential condition, locked in a cage emptied by the dichotomous relationship between being and non-being; in the Hamlet-like doubt indelibly marked on the flesh (since years of hospitalization in the Colorno asylum), in the impossibility of subverting and raising awareness among the common opinion. So in the knowledge that Hamlet's tragedy will still be –continuously, perpetually – with or without the spectator. Each actor camouflages their status within that of the characters in the tragedy, entering perfectly into symbiosis with them, transcribing their narrative score through a singular emotional feeling, which is, at the same time, traversed along the diegetic lines of the dramaturgical text and scrolling along the chronological axis of their own existence, along the invisible lines of the possibilities (and probabilities) of cognitive perception. While every word takes on carnal weight, while the characters of Hamlet fall onto the scene with the gravity of a playful madness, like ghosts and invisible corpses, while love and abandonment devour the bowels to shine through like worms on the skin, at the edges of the scene the actors experience their disorientation, their lack of action, they seek guidance, cast glances, help each other, hold hands, making the viewer's gaze inadequate. How sensitively should we approach the scene? With what existential diaphragm to penetrate Hamlet's castle? And what happens when vision (or visionarity) leaves room for objectification (or a condition – that of madness – definitively objectified)? Finally, even the audience's gaze is caught in the impossibility of action, suspended in the doubt of the balance between an ethical or aesthetic contemplation of tragedy.

Eleonora Felisatti

HAMLET of LENZ REFRACTIONS

A swing between character and performer, really to be or not to be

The air in the Po Valley is colder than usual; in San Secondo Parmense there is a slight haze, which makes this early November night gloomy, almost mysterious. Around the Court of the Reds, silence and desert. Thus, it is easier to imagine being at the gates of Elsinore Castle. White makeup masks. Amplified voice on the microphone, which reverberates words in the spaces of the Renaissance palace that are not immediately understandable because they are not perfectly articulated. On this multilayered image, the first two actors of Lenz Rifrazioni begin to guide the audience through the beautifully frescoed rooms of the Rock. Once you go up the staircase, you find yourself in a real audience room. And, while the number of performers is smaller than Shakespeare's Hamlet predicts for the second scene, the videos projected at the back still recall other presences: not only the ghosts repeatedly evoked in the story, but also other moments of the performers. Images in two dimensions mix, overlap, complement, and open new horizons compared to those in three dimensions. By seeing footage that looks like rehearsal and/or workshop footage, one is implicitly forced to consider both the life of the group outside of performance and the lives of the characters outside of the scene. Yes, because it is precisely through a funnel skimming, which starts from the original text, passes through familiar idioms and clichés, but also through the vision that the project members have, that we arrive at the condensation adopted for the staging. The live video-action combination, dear to Lenz for years, repeats itself room after room. Even, you go through some where there are only screens that carry forward, endlessly diluting, the exit of a character. In another case, the video is projected onto the floor and trampled by a ghost-fighting Hamlet. Until the penultimate scene, in which only the video leads to the conclusions of the story and its ‘moral’, subsequently made explicit in the presence of all the actors, and consequently all the characters, in the main hall.

The choice to have a single actor play multiple roles is not merely instrumental to the numerical size of the cast, but rather has the effect of not making us ‘attached’ to the character nor to the “transducer” (a term to indicate the actor, adopted by Lenz's direction for H=277 lb, the first study on Shakespeare's tragedy), in the sense that any expectation about the outcome of the interpretation is forcibly disregarded if not nullified altogether.

What can work is to focus on the words of Hamlet, rather than Polonius, or Ophelia. On their gestures. In this way, the obstacle in the identification given by an imperfect acting performance is expertly dribbled away, causing the emphasis on the actor's reality to fall away. Pathos undergoes a shift in vector: what creates it, in Lenz's Hamlet, is not so much the content of the text as the strength of the interpreters' action.

The here-and-now of the former psychic long-term carers of the Colorno asylum, rather than the role of the characters. And it doesn't matter whether the story tells of betrayals at court or of Snow White's unexpected life among the dwarves, what we couldn't shake is the perception of the aftermath of madness. The spectator has the choice to decide which altered perception of reality is more irreversible, whether that of the actors or that of the characters. And what remains of the original text? The emphasis is on repetition, almost mechanical, almost an echo that moves away from the suggestion of assertiveness and instead insinuates doubts, woodworms for the viewer. Those who, trivially, will remain even later, on the route away from the humid medieval fortification.