What does it look like? Portrait of the artist after his death ? A virtuous exercise that sows doubt, cultivates confusion and pursues, with feigned serenity, the uncertainties of the blossoming public. Written and directed by Davide Carnevali, an Italian born in 1981, this demonic play reminds, at the Théâtre de la Bastille in Paris, how much contemporary drama needs living authors to regenerate.
Portrait of the artist after his death it’s a cleverly thought out, subtly developed and finely acted nugget. If this very intriguing text revitalizes writing, it is because it is not set in stone. The author adapts it to the nationality of the person who embodies it. In this case, it is an actor born in Argentina, Marcial Di Fonzo Bo, who unfolds the flight lines of a fable built on successive inclusions according to a principle dear to Pirandello: mise en abyme.
Alone on a stage where two technicians are busy, the actor introduces himself during a short monologue (improvised, he explains). What is his name, where was he born, what year. How one day he received a letter addressed to Mar-z-ial Di Fonzo Bo (the typo is significant) to inform him that he had just inherited an apartment in Buenos Aires. Finally, how this event, told to Davide Carnevali, whom he met by chance, would awaken the author’s desire to write a suitable piece for the performer. She will be inspired by this mysterious apartment.
Apartment inhabited by ghosts
This apartment, here it is. He is there on the set, displayed on a stage. A casual interior with armchair, kitchen, desk and wooden walls. A deserted place, but which will not remain so, since the narrative will populate it with ghosts: those of the protagonists who are supposed to have lived there and whose daily life, imagined by the actor, brings the mill to an exponential dramaturgy . .
Di Fonzo Bo explains: He and Carnevali rent a soulless Airbnb in Buenos Aires. As Carnevali falls ill, he must lead a single-handed investigation whose ramifications stretch from Argentina under the dictatorship to the hunt for Jews in Europe during World War II. This investigation is protean: police, topographical, historical, psychiatric, and above all theoretical, in the sense that its (barely hidden) purpose is to explore the possibilities of fiction. How far can a literary creation go to derail reality and our perception of it?
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