The dialogue between Mario Martone and Paolo Di Paolo on the language of love starting from Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, which the director brings to the stage in March
PAUL DI PAOLO: «After a week of songs from Sanremo, also or above all about love and in the somewhat worn-out atmosphere of a party like Valentine’s Day, it doesn’t seem inappropriate to ask ourselves if and how we talk about love. If we really know how to do it, if there is still an indestructible embarrassment to overcome (especially in males? Indeed, in elderly males?). If we confine romantic impulses to a separate area of life that hardly infiltrates adult days, our schedule of Western people pressed by commitments, appointments, coffees, possibly from Tinder or Grindr. If and how much the spirit that we still define as romantic, despite having lost a bit of its original root, plays a part in all of this. If I read – in the translation made by Chiara Lagani for her Romeo and Juliet which, produced by the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, will debut on March 2nd – “Romeo, Romeo! Why are you Romeo? Renegade your father, reject your name…”, I gasp, but I wonder: can we still talk about love like this?”
MARIO MARTON: «I needed a new translation of the text that adhered to the project of a contemporary Shakespeare, with the same spirit as some of my opera directions. The topical additions to the original are perceived on stage but also appear in the jokes as stabs. But there is one aspect that I wanted to preserve and, if possible, make even more intense. I also tried to do this by choosing two very young actors as protagonists (Giulietta, or Anita Serafini, is 15 years old; Romeo, played by Francesco Gheghi, is 18): their acting, far from academicism, brings to the stage a freshness and an immediacy that makes a specific trait of this work even more dazzling. And that is Shakespeare’s ability to make the language of the two young lovers a creation in itself, a kind of reaction, even lexical, to their surroundings. Around them there is a horrible world, a vicious, conflicted society, there is a permanent clash, fueled by an aggressive instinct which in many respects resembles the current situation, in which the fall of ideological alibis causes violence without reasons to explode , an end in itself. Here, Romeo and Juliet meet at a party – like an eighteen year old and a fifteen year old of today and of every era – and it is immediately love, but above all it is immediately poetry. I mean that their talking draws a sort of “bubble” around them; and if it is true, as Proust said, that two lovers are somehow two artists, two creators, well, they actually create a world made of different, authentic, incandescent words. They look for their alternative to the dominant language. It is no coincidence that I make Friar Lorenzo say, with the bewilderment with which an old man listens to the indecipherable words that the very young exchange with each other: “But that’s how you talk?”
OF PAUL: «I’d like to know how all the Romeos and Juliets of 2023 speak to each other, at different latitudes, in the “bubble” of their endless chats, a kind of extension of the amorous, even erotic, conversation that takes place in real life. But then, see? I correct myself. “From life” refers to an outdated dichotomy, good only for the moralism of digital non-natives. A chat on any social network is still real. And it has its own code, perhaps even creative, not necessarily based on the most cloying and laughable endearments when considered from the outside. Searching for the words to express a feeling of love seems to me in itself a literary effort, even if unconsciously. The academic patina that has also rightly settled on the texts of the origins of literature in Italian makes us lose sight of the strength of that saying love in a newborn language, entrusting – literally – to a song the task of reaching the beloved. «Canzonetta novella, go and sing…»: it is Jacopo da Lentini. «Song look for her if you can / Tell her you never leave me / Go through the streets and among the people / Tell her gently»: it’s that genius Lucio Dalla».
MARTON: «To talk about love one becomes a poet by force of circumstances. At least once or twice in our life we all are. In the film about Massimo Troisi that I will present in Berlin, I insist a lot on that almost aphasic trait of Massimo and his characters / alter egos. He makes uncertainty feel very good not only in finding love, in understanding if it really exists, because it appears, disappears, deceives us, deceives us; he does more: he makes us feel the effort in finding the right words. In his last film, The postmanseems to succeed thanks to his friendship with a poet. And so even the humble postman finds his words good for expressing love. It is a bright landing place, but also a form of revolt. One can speak in another way!»
OF PAUL: “Are you telling me that, to make the language of the present less toxic, we should always talk a little like lovers?”
MARTON: “If we talk about what we love (I’m not referring only to relationships, to bonds between people), we talk better”.
OF PAUL: «The lexical harshness of the current era seems to be flushed out of a page by Mann from a hundred years ago, when he writes, in Magic mountain, of a “general tendency to venomous bickering”, eyes that flash while hurling insults, “fierce quarrels and insolent altercations”. The Veronese climate at the time of the Montagues and the Capulets was not so different either, right? The widespread and apparently recurring tendency to reason and speak against, the difficulty in saying “for something”».
MARTON: «An atavistic impulse, which perhaps has its phases of greater intensity and contagion. In the show, the words and behavior of a character like Father Capulet have something terrible that I would like the viewer to feel disturbed by».
OF PAUL: “He’s a man, he’s a male, and he also represents the harshness of an age-old patriarchal society. Several Capulet fathers flourish and still flourish at different latitudes, denying the freedom of love both in private and in public, petty domestic dictators or institutionalized despots. It cannot be a coincidence that many protests (in the streets as well as on TikTok) against the repressive grip of the Iranian regime have a love song as a background, Another love by Tom Odell.”
MARTON: «Opposing a highly poetic language to a highly violent world is a form of radical protest, it is rebellion, as I said. We may have let certain conjunctions loosen too much: love and language, rebellion and language. Also in this perspective, the dangerous inclination of those who lived at least half a life in the twentieth century to look at the present with little optimism can be rebalanced. There is a world, there is a universe ahead! The fairytale tree at the center of the stage of the show refers to a space built by the youngest as an alternative, a natural and magical place. Among those branches unhappiness, disillusionment and mistakes will not be spared, but there is the emotional impetus that makes outdated schemes break and look for alternative codes. On the other hand, the thrust of the senses and desires also finds fulfillment in the individual and collective ability to pronounce them, to make them exist. With new words, when needed, and in any case: with exact words».