The Ferracchiati’s Gull flies very high

«How things reflected in the water tremble», on stage at the Piccolo in Milan, is, according to the author and director Liv Ferracchiati, «freely based» on Chekhov’s «The Seagull». But rather than a rewriting I would speak of an adaptation close to the original, as well as, I hasten to add, very intelligent, delicate and effective. The story is always the same, condensed into two hours and twenty straight, restricted to eight characters, set in an unspecified and vaguely contemporary place: vinyl records are listened to, the writer to whom the vain visiting novelist is disadvantageously compared is David Foster Wallace. But we always find ourselves in a large house overlooking a lake, very far from the places where people live and culture, a house animated by the occasional stays of the owner, a famous actress who has passed her moment of brilliance and who neglects the teenage son, abandoned there without means and without education but furiously determined to seek a path in artistic creation. Without underlining the discreet interventions made to place the story in a context closer to us, the direction coordinates with impeccable rhythm and with a light, melancholy irony the alternation of the figures who, as always in Chekhov, are all absorbed in their own selfishness: the prima donna in need of continually reaffirming herself, her intellectual suitor who is famous but aware of his own mediocrity, the actress’s brother, an elderly do-nothing who has wasted his life, the frustrated school teacher, the provincial girl in love and disappointed, the young girl full of aspirations that listen to the wrong man and get ruined; and the son devoured by anger at his own impotence and the disappointments he suffers. This role, which is rarely seen interpreted in a convincing way, is this time superbly rendered by Giovanni Cannata, very measured in his anger, in his clumsiness, in his outbursts of a boy of today and of all times. As a director he then has the elegance to enhance all the others too, starting from the overbearing Shakespearean mother designed by Laura Marinoni with great taste.