After the debut at the Campania Theatre Festival 2023, from Friday 16 to Sunday 18 February (Friday and Saturday at 8.30 pm; Sunday at 6 pm) comes to the stage of Sala Assoli «The tragedy of Richard III or of death and other deceptions», a rewrite from «Richard III» by William Shakespeare by Gianluca Bonagura and Elvira Buonocore, with Edoardo Sorgente interpreting the bloody Shakespearian character, directed by Gianluca Bonagura.
The tragedy of Richard III - the first work of the falsepartenze theatre company, made in collaboration with Casa del Contemporaneo and Nostos theatre - constitutes the first chapter of the Trilogy of infinite jokes, dedicated by the company to the works of the great English playwright. The rewrite captures King Richard in the fraction of a second that separates life from death, which according to the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan book of the dead, is the bardo, or the moment in which you have the opportunity to relive your entire life.
In the Bardo Thodol, the bardo is indicated as the intermediate stage that the conscious soul lives after death or rather, between death and rebirth. According to this theory, after death: "the mind remains in the continuation of the life just ended. You return to the places and people you know, appearing immediately in any place you think of".
In this rewrite, the absolute protagonist is time: Richard always wants more and is in a hurry to have it. Why? Because there is no time. Or rather he knows he doesn't have enough. And, in particular, the obsession with death is outlined: the design that comes out of it moves subtly in tracing Richard's struggle with fate and his game on the chessboard of the world. That world where deformity is internal; where the coveted throne is nothing more than the concrete search for unanimous recognition of his beauty: Richard wants to be loved.
The plots that lead him in search of this love are full of murders and assassinations. And the recognition, the crown, the throne, even when they arrive do not have the taste that he imagined or perhaps intimately wished they had.
"From a dramaturgical point of view, telling the moment of Richard's death - explain Bonagura and Buonocore - means to subvert the logic of the classic temporal narrative flow and to arrive at a new space/time, that of memory, of dream, where illusions are more alive, where fictions are palpable and you can touch the secret ambition, the denial, the effort, the self-denial of a human character so human that we feel him deeply close to us, to our living, to our era. An era marked by the spread of capitalism, based and built on social climbing and in which the shadow of failure echoes on everyone's heads like a specter. Where the real ghosts have living bodies and superb thoughts, docile voices and sharp teeth. To this macro-theme are linked other more subtle themes, present but visible in watermark, such as that of exclusion and failure. Richard is an outsider and as such does everything to get back into the circle of the chosen ones, his desire for power is first of all the daughter of a social and therefore family revenge".