Almost fifteen years since his debut with I pretendenti by Lagarce – produced by the Piccolo in 2009 – Carmelo Rifici is once again staging an exhilarating farce, written by the most important name in Nineteenth and Twentieth-century vaudeville; Georges Feydeau. Adapted from the original by Rifici in collaboration with Tindaro Granata, La pulce nell’orecchio is the story of a wife who, in order to prove the presumed infidelity of her husband, uses a friend to send him a passionate and anonymous love letter, proposing to meet in a by-the-hour hotel where she intends to wait for him, thus catching him out. The events that take place in that hotel are an incredible interweaving of the most outrageous and absurd situations; everyone is fleeing from and chasing after each other, desperately trying to save face, in a whirlwind of increasingly complicated events leading to the clamorous final resolution of the various mysteries.
«In recent years – explains Rifici – my work as a director has focused on the theme of language and its ambiguity. La pulce nell’orecchio is a farce based on language, or rather a linguistic farce. Just like Shakespeare’s greatest comedies, we are presented with a representation of human relationships based on the wisdom of words, but, unlike with the great English bard, Feydeau lends the play a perfect comical mechanism. It is a clock of rare precision, which leads his characters and their way of speaking beyond a play of words as a means to an end, as pure entertainment, and escapism, with the aim of exploring their most profound theatrical potential and the utmost in human folly.»
For this new adventure, the artistic director of the LAC in Lugano is accompanied by a creative team that he has been working with for years – the scenographer Guido Buganza, the costume designer Margherita Baldoni, the lighting designer Alessandro Verazzi – and by a cast of actors, most of whom trained at the Piccolo Academy of Theatre, which he has been directing since the death of Ronconi.