An all-female Balzac Sonia Bergamasco in the director’s chair, and the performances of Federica Fracassi and Isabella Ragonese bring life to the staging of a text that Stefano Massini has loosely based on Letters of two brides (1842), the only epistolary novel by the author of The human comedy.
“Fragments of a discussion on love - observes Sonia Bergamasco -. Louise and Renée are two young women tied by a profound friendship which goes right back to when they were young children, together in a convent. Their facing life “outside”, their return “home”, corresponds to the beginning of an exchange of letters which, over the years, continues their reciprocal search for a common alphabet of love. Brought together and isolated in the ardent voice of a present of the heart, the two figures of women imagined by Balzac still tell of the unstoppable impulse of desire and the sense of loss that daily adventures unavoidably bring to each and every human being”.
“On a ring of highly-polished cruelty - explains Stefano Massini -, the examination of what it means to be a woman is held, an examination on the contradictions of love, on the desperation of a denied sociality. An epistolary battle of questions and answers. A ruthless analyst of the human condition, Balzac - like few others - was capable of focussing the microscope on the female labyrinth. Here he provides us with a encyclopaedic treatise which proceeds by definitions, at times of an unheard of profoundness, to create the mosaic of a complex play, inspired by the fundamental nouns of the female condition, from “illusion” to “rape”, from “love” to “decadence”, and so on”.