Pollicino

If there is only a "Western" wound that the world of the Fairy Tale as a microcosm of Law cannot heal and which therefore leaves the Fairy Tale itself open, infinitely disembowelable and disemboweled, at the mercy of its own opposite: Lenz's investigation into the Grimm's rugged "terrestrial paradises" concludes, in the recent setting of the POLLICINO, with a question that takes shape precisely in the attitude with which the characters bid farewell to visibility in the final picture of the entire work.

On the ground on the stage, as a utopia of the domestic idyll, the square tablecloth of the innocent and reconciled daily is unfolded, but the figures who, in the name of the Father and the Mother (therefore of History and Nature) preside over the ritual of the meal that seals the eternal return of the Identical, have already always and forever been inexorable executors of the Sentence and the "fall into the abyss" which promises to coincide in perspective with the very eternity of the massacre as the "normality" of the day.

It is in the finale that, with the gigantic shears and the meat slicer raised high like trumpets of Judgment, the paternal and maternal instance, from one jamb of space to another, open the scene to the Future, in the service of baroque angels who separate the curtains on the Secret. It lies, finally obscene, in the center, in the subsequent historical afterlife, and thus exposed, Tristan and Inane, it reveals the background to the outing as the "Last Supper", which never ends because the Victim is always renewed.

As in other dramatic parables of LENZ, even in the heroic model proposed by POLLICINO the possibility of resurrection appears ambiguous, infinite-instead-the eternity of the threat. The more at stake here is the resurrection as a discourse on "alternative" time, since in the original fairy tale model Tom Thumb, which so many times disappears and reappears between chthonic or visceral darkness and open sky or agrarian light or domestic lamp, is the bearer and lookout and auctioneer of the solar myth that wanders through spiral labyrinths (a kernel, an ear, an intestine ) and which between sleep and wakefulness is activated in the will of victory of the homunculus, as a cunning directed against Death. But wandering the Underworld without redemption is a common condition in the Modern; every exit from the labyrinth in this case proves apparent: either the Minotaur defeated in the depths reappears in the world of supposed salvation in multiplied copies, or it incorporates itself as a chrysalis into the victor himself, who ascends to the surface and, still unaware, prepares to bring contagion, rather than light, into the world.

In LENZ's interpretation, the irredeemable Hell coincides with the prophecy of the execution of Illusion: the Filius Hermafroditus who, so long invoked by the Desire of generations, lay in the sleep of the revolutionary incunabulum, rose in vain from trial to trial. In vain has he slipped from hiding, in vain has he soiled himself with the background of the world, in vain has he reopened his face "to the fresh air" after labyrinths of degradation: the ending brings him back, an enigmatic prey already marked, to the passive place of the origin, to sleep.

The threatening reappropriation of the child by the parents is the defeat in alchemical terms of opus -. The New One will be devoured by the Old One, as his own hostage: this is announced by the angels of Judgment, the parents themselves, who in the final scene, while flaunting the instruments of Execution, speak alongside the central action like figures of the Chorus, bringing voices of tragic irony to the already condemned Future: the legitimate monopoly of Truth, according to this scene, is in the hands of those who dedicate the Illusion to death.

The first sacrilege, therefore, that LENZ's operation commits towards the fairy tale scheme that, as a normative rite at the end of each story, would require the recomposition of the violated social balance, is precisely the dragging of the Fairy Tale onto the stage, an act that in itself denies it a return to a "peaceful" framework: in fact, it is sometimes a drama, as there is a crime.

But also sacrilegious, in this POLLICINO, is the deviation of the Fairy Tale from the conservative Everequal that usually makes it speak.

In LENZ's scenic operation, in fact, the Fairy Tale is "interpretation", therefore a prospective discourse on History. Figuratively, this formal intention is expressed in the semantic use of the "fifths," where what must be glimpsed in the scenic horizons following the foreground proves necessary to the enigmatic production of the Secret: there, in the secondary spaces, lie the materials of hiding, defecation, binge eating, and forced eating, as scenic segments of the ironic montage of Disenchantment; there lies, at the beginning and end of the story, Tom Thumb, as fetus and body. Thus often unfolding on the ground in the further space, in visual concretion the meaning of LENZ'S LITTLE CHICKEN is therefore assimilated to Anamorphosis as a cryptic/critical language on the true nature of History, which reveals itself only to the exaltation of the inquiring gaze. Anamorphosis as a melancholic formal paradox: the perspective wisdom that must shed rational light on images stretches over them as a shadow.

But there is a luminous and numinous element, in the scene of POLLICINO, which passes through any perspective projection and contrasts it - absolutely - as an "apparition". It is the physical body in which Tom Thumb is incarnated: the abnormal body of down-actress Barbara Voghera, so often at the centre of LENZ's directorial choices, a hermaphrodite who carries antithetical dramatic identities, from Hamlet, in particular, to Little Red Riding Hood. Numen in vita, theatrical theatrical toy, Christic body: no representative machine, no fictitious character who finds breath, voice and movement in it, can remove from this physiognomy and from this "other" body the very symbolic of Destiny: even before embodying any dramatic story, they are the Meaning.That Meaning plays another part in itself is a marvelous fact par excellence, therefore intrinsically "theatrical": every moment of the presence on stage of this body sacralized by its natural mark is therefore a document of meta-theatre.It is no coincidence that so often in the operations of the LENZ and also in the POLLICINO it is subjected to martyrdom or obscene exposure: the whole problematic of the Sacred converges in the Monstrum and the fact that this assumes, in the recitative discipline, a potentially infinite series of masks, makes its historical and organic existence a living allegory, that paradox of Dionysian mysteries whereby the actor must remain untouchable and untouched in the exact circumscription of his own aura, or he will be killed.

"KYRIE ELEISON": to which sacrifice are the liturgical notes of the POLLICINO musical collection dedicated? They introduce the experience of the molecular hero, traverser of animalistic intestines, dung and sewage, abandoned shells and fescues, into the sphere of the Sublime: death is certain, redemption uncertain. The entire world of toys is called to harvest by scenography, costumes, masks, artificial and organic stage materials stigmatized by the need for the "fairytale" essence: schematic bearers therefore not of reality but of wonder. Yet the child-world is not the Victim here, nor is the sacrifice taking place under the Oedipal seal nor is the dialectic of Guilt consumed between the unattainable height of the "Father's tower" and the obsessive and implacable nourishment of the Mother.

Despite the original fairy tale, LENZ's LITTLE THUMB is rather the Odradeck and the "inborn of Guilt" of the Kafkaesque horizon; but Odradeck is saved by hiding from visibility in his parents' house; Little Thumb here today is lost precisely because, in front of the Institution, he makes himself "visible." Is this also the fate of the Image that becomes concrete in the theatre? The POLLICINO is a metaphor for this aesthetic doubt throughout its entire journey.

At the very center of this metaphor shines, in the Desire that maintains the dramatic instance, the Monstrum that interprets itself.