«Una realtà di puri echi»: simbolo e comunione in Pirandello, chi? di Amelio Memè Perlini

Abstract

The direction of theatre of the 1970s, as Valentina Valentini writes, characterized New Theatre in Italy with its tendency to expand beyond geographic and disciplinary borders and, at the same time, with its tension towards a common core (body, gesture, movement) to «find shelter in the place of theatre like in the productions of TeatroImmagine (as defined by Bartolucci) by Mario Ricci, Memè Perlini, Giancarlo Nanni, Giuliano Vasilicò». Memè Perlini’s work on Pirandello’s play was in fact a process of permeation, in the Latin sense of per- «through» and meare «transit». Six Characters in Search of an Author by Pirandello represented a double enlightenment for him: one that could be termed public, concerning his way of understanding the stage, the other inherent to a personal and collective unhappiness that «filled his days and nights» and which he wove into the writing of Pirandello chi?, staged for the first time in 1973, as mentioned above, at Beat ’72 in Rome. Perlini transposed the fragmentary nature typical of society at that time into what he defined as fragment-images, aimed at reducing the body of the actor on stage into sections of light and darkness, in the idiosyncratic drive to «parcel, shatter theatrical objects (fear of the body) but also a clear attempt to reconstruct them (desire to represent)».