Il barone rampante is a story that since 1957, the year in which the novel was published, has enchanted and impassioned audiences of all ages because – as the director explains – «it is a book rich with cues for everyone; from the relationship with authority, complex at any age, to the relationship between humankind and the environment. It is a “political” work, in the broadest sense of the term, a story in which both adults and children can all identify with.»
The vertical dialect of the text is brought to the stage through a system of podiums and walkways, functional yet light; it is here that the young Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò lives out his personal revolution from the day in which, punished by his father for having refused to eat a plate of snails, he climbed up into a tree in the park of his family’s residence, never to come down again.
Set in an “imaginary” Liguria in the middle of an eighteenth century that sets the stage for the French Revolution and that is reflected in the play’s costumes, «Il barone rampante – continues Frati –, in providing us with a character that moves overhead, forces us to look up from the devices in which we are isolated; to leave the cage of our individuality. Young Cosimo, incarnating a drive to improve the world around him, makes me think of young contemporary environmental activists, and all those who have the courage to change their point of view and work for the common good.»