Seventy years on from the publication of Bradbury’s masterpiece, and fifty-eight from the release of the film of the same name by François Truffaut. Sotterraneo has begun to write an original work freely inspired by the novel, asking – together with the audience and through the language of theatre – where the risk of totalitarianism lies today. In 1953, Ray Bradbury imagined a dystopian future in which reading was forbidden, and whoever was caught reading or in possession of books was arrested. Paradoxically, fire brigades were not used to put out fires, but rather to burn books. As with all totalitarian regimes, there is a clandestine group of dissidents, the book people, who memorise great classics of international literature to save them from destruction, thus passing them on to future generations.
«The book came out around 70 years ago – explain the members of the Sotterraneo collective – but it is set in the future, in the twenties of the 21st century, in other words, today. Yet you live in the 21st century and you are reading this; does this mean that Bradbury was wrong? It depends on how we interpret dystopia; a prediction for the future that is either confirmed or disproved at a certain point, or a warning for the present that continues to sound?».
Il fuoco era la cura provides an in-depth examination and free interpretation of Fahrenheit 451, consuming it as one does with a beloved book, read thousands of times and taken on thousands of journeys, as the cover fades, the paper escapes its binding, and the pages fill with notes, tickets, bookmarks and recollections. Five performers look back over the history of the novel, identifying with the characters, moving horizontally to map the areas of shade, the things that Bradbury does not explain or recount, creating parallel lines of narration, alternative theories, going as far as to construct the story of an intermediate period between our present and an anticultural future in which stupification saves us from the burden of complex thought.
And what if Bradbury simply got his dates wrong by a few years, if the events of Fahrenheit 451 were to take place now; what would we do?