A choral and tormenting creation, Ragazzi di vita, based on the novel by Pasolini, brings to the stage a horde of voices and bodies which speak in the Rome dialect and pass their days in the suburbs, looking for a few lire and new ways to pass their time.
It is Rome as seen through Pasolini’s eyes in the booming 1950s, after having arrived in the city, suffering greatly from his being expelled from the Italian Communist Party, his being fired from his position as a teacher in a secondary school, and his separation from his beloved Fruili, where he spent his youth.
Faithful to the original work, Emanuele Trevi has written a stage play which expresses Pasolini’s prose in all of its incisiveness, and strengthens the ties between theatre, literature, and the identity of the city.
Popolizio’s directing underlines the irrepressible vitality and poetry of youth, alternating irony and hardness, innocence and the abysses. The character of Lino Guanciale, the alter ego of Pasolini himself, wanders like a “stranger” visiting that world, a mediator between the audience and the stage, a common thread which binds all of the stories told in the novel.