Danio Manfredini brings to the Piccolo his latest work, Nel lago del cor, a title which draws on the first song from Dante’s Inferno (Allor fu la paura un poco queta, che nel lago del cor m’era durata la notte ch’i’ passai con tanta pieta - At this my fear was somewhat quieted, for through the night of sorrow I had spent, the lake within my heart felt terror present), in which the poet describes the fear and anguish felt in the “shadowed forest”. It is a special place for Dante, and Manfredini’s play describes places that are all too real: the concentration camps that represent the ferocity of humankind, symbols of terror and suffering, of existential and spiritual loss that has never been experienced elsewhere.

An exhausted deportee on a “death march” looks back over the dramatic experiences that he lived through in the camp. Like a ghost, he becomes one with the images of the camp, and plunges once again into a nightmare of misery, death, rain, snow, cold and fear. The words of the deportee are bits of dialogue, remembered phrases, sounds in different languages from a strange Babel, all interwoven with the songs of the liberator soldier who, like an angel, accompanies him in that hell. “I dedicate this work to survivors, because their words have guided me, and I dedicate it as a requiem to all those who died in the camps without leaving a trace”. The music composed and played live by Francesco Pini, the images and movements, all blend with the words in Manfredini’s piece. “It is an attempt to find, in this web of emotions, a trace of this human experience through the meagre means of the theatre”.