Valerio Binasco, the new artistic director at the Teatro Stabile di Torino, returns to the classics, and chooses Molière. Don Giovanni is one of the most revisited characters in literature: a callous seducer, atheist, criminal, he has pervaded the history of western imagination from Tirso to Mozart.
“What I am trying to do - explains Binasco - is to bring together that which as a director and actor I have learned from various sources, from the masters, and from past experience. Nowadays we are led by a sacrosanct need, which is to recover our relationship with audiences. This is why we have to do the impossible to make ourselves understandable, to move every single spectator, to not make them feel “a stranger” to the work”.
In the complex figure which Molière created in 1665 to continue, following on from Tartufo, his protest against the righteous and the hypocrites, Binasco sees “a great celebration of storytelling”, in which the classics participate with the joy of being re-read in the light of times passed.