Two elderly variety actors who have worked together all their lives to then separate due to unresolvable misunderstandings are invited to reunite for a single evening on the occasion of a television programme dedicated to the history of the glorious American variety show. Their past quarrels are quick to resurface, setting in motion a brilliantly funny and profoundly melancholic moment of theatre.
After Pour un oui ou pour un non – at the Teatro Grassi in January 2022 – Umberto Orsini and Franco Branciaroli return to the stage for the play written by Neil Simon in 1972, which soon became a successful film, an attempt to bring together everything that related the piece to the theatre of Beckett (Endgame) or even of Chekhov (Swansong), rather than to a work of pure entertainment. In this tribute to the world of the actor, their small, delightful manias and tragic miseries are combined with the directing skills of Massimo Popolizio, who identifies in the two lead characters those companions with whom he has shared so many experiences: some of the most intense and meaningful moments of theatre in recent years.