Le donne gelose returns to the stage after the great success of last season, directed by Giorgio Sangati. The first play to have been written by Goldoni completely in Venetian dialect, it tells the story of life in a Venetian neighbourhood where, during the last days of Carnival, a decadent micro-cosmos of shop-owners and merchants lead themselves to ruin at the gaming tables in the shadows of illicit gabling venues.
“it is a closed world - explains Sangati - claustrophobic, without contact with the world outside.
Human relationships are wretched, hypocritical; the relationships corrosive, mouldy, permanently conditioned by money; the intimacy is squalid, characterised by insults and beatings. The cult of money and an obsession with gambling reigns: in fact only fate can lighten the anxiety of falling (again) into misery, but it is only a temporary respite for a world whose destiny is set. Nobody works, but energy is spent, everyone hurries, they chase and consume each other, without ever finding a way out, as though in a labyrinth where one twists and turns to end up exactly where they started”. In an unusual Venice; dark, silent and at times surreal, set to the music of “tema della follia”, the plotting of the widow Lugrezia dismantle and re-assemble the existence of two families, in a whirlwind of grotesque misunderstandings, where the laughter has the black shadings of farce.