Two respectable bourgeois couples, of that respectability that crystallizes in form rather than substance, meet to settle a violent quarrel that has broken out between their children. At first everything seems to take place in the name of civilization, but it all doesn’t last long to turn instead into a devastating game of slaughter. This in synthesis is the plot of one of the most successful comedies of the French writer Jasmine Reza, Le Dieu du carnage, which arrives in Mittelfest today and tomorrow in double performance at 7pm and 9.30pm in the Cloister of San Francesco. Wanted by Arlef who produces it with Css and Mittelfest, the show is interpreted by Fabiano Fantini, Rita Maffei also director with Fabrizio Arcuri, Massimo Somaglino and Aida Talliente, while the scenes are by Luigina Tusini.
But why the God of massacre and Mittelfest? We asked the two directors. “It was born in the first place as a linguistic operation – explains Maffei – because we took the suggestion of Arlef who pointed it out to us, to work on the translation into Friulian, using Friulian in a sort of mongrelization with Italian, as well as it happens every day ».
Why is this happening?
«While the tension between the four grows – again Maffei – also the language in some way evolves. At the beginning, Italian masks, in this specific case as an abstract language of the convention, the most authentic and profound feelings, which gradually emerge with Friulian, which thus ends up by revealing itself as the language of the most authentic moods and instincts. Good manners, tolerance, respect for points of view, politically correct, morality itself, leave room for gut feelings and decidedly more malignant and ruthless, unmask “the god of massacre”, who has become Maçalizi (this is the title of the spectacle), which can nestle inside each of us ».
Isn’t it dangerous and counterproductive to use Friulian in this way, giving string to those who believe that it is a heavy, carnal, slang, Sotan language?
“No! Italian in fact dominates the first part when couples speak and act with the tip of a fork, and as the veil of hypocrisy is lowered, the real thoughts of the characters come out and therefore the Friulian language is at that point the language of concreteness. and truth: not only linked to anger and outburst, but also to the idea of a mother tongue, a language of intimacy, given that one of the two couples speaks Friulian ».
«The trick – adds Arcuri – that we have chosen is also to ensure that one of the characters is not Friulian and this forces the others to speak also in Italian. Among other things, the script, according to Maffei, is not an adaptation, but a translation, signed by William Cisilino and Michele Calligaris ».
We come to the show. «There is a scene with a central plan, a sort of room / living room with large windows, through which the spectators all around spy and hear, through headphones, what is happening. We started – concludes Arcuri – from the fact that it is a bourgeois text, which includes the fourth part, and if those Ibsen were founding texts of bourgeois society, this which arrives 200 years later unmasks its hypocrisies and false morality. For this reason, starting from the precious caption by Yasmina Reza which reads “a living room, nothing realistic”, we have amplified everything, entering the fourth wall, imagining a stage box – as if it were a cage or an aquarium – to put under a lens of enlargement – and under the eyes of the spectators who surround it – this unusual cruel ménage that allows itself to be scrutinized and vivisected, a sort of anatomical cabinet, or a self-propelled radio play ».