A story that lasts for just one morning, but that covers eleven years of events, from 1943 to 1954. A polyphony of points of view, characters, voices, dialogues, descriptions, and stories all set in Naples, the city that “mortally wounds you or puts you to sleep”. A novel, a classic of Italian literature, on the clash between nature and history, on unrequited love, returns and regrets, but also a masterpiece of style, of sound and music in which, as the author admits, “The real protagonist is time, the time of youth”.
Roberto Andò takes on Ferito a morte by Raffaele La Capria, which won the Strega award in 1961, with a version created for the theatre by Emanuele Trevi, winner of the same award sixty years later. “Just as with any story that focuses on the passing of time – explained the director –, in a totally original and unique manner, La Capria’s novel is crossed with ghosts from history. In this sense, it is also a book on the failure of the southern Italian upper class, on the corrosive corruption of money, on the abuse of sex, on the decline of the city and its inhabitants, on logorrhoea and megalomania, on the pleasure of making an impression and pretending to be someone else. Above all, it is a story, as Leonardo Colombati wrote, that has no beginning and no end. To adapt (a word that has always seemed to me to be imprecise or unsuitable) this great novel for the theatre, I called on the help of the writer Emanuele Trevi, who has always dedicated his wonderful writings to bringing those who have passed back to life, to grasp those moments in life that would otherwise be condemned to oblivion”.