Biancofango

All the boys, outlined by Shakespeare in what appears more and more at each rereading as a fresco between Fathers and Sons, suffer. Romeo suffers in his falling in love with everything. Juliet suffers as she fells deceived by the adult world too early. Rosaline suffers, this splendid silent portrait that, on the margins of the text, quietly tries to get open and give her self-respect. Benvolio suffers perpetually behind someone’s back. Mercutio suffers, he can’t believe that he must die. Tybalt suffers in this furious and endless anger from which he can only come out defeated. And along with them, all the others, a multitude, but everyone has a touching singularity and humanity. They don’t know what love is although they talk about it all the time. They don’t know what hate is although they obsessively try to shape it. They wander around the dirty city, the stumble over the words, they try to fight a world having no space for them. They scream, they clamour, they don’t know where to go and they wander, wander, wander. They were written four hundred years ago, but they don’t seem far from the kids of today.
For this reason, to play the young characters of the Shakespearean text we called just teenagers and next to them two professional actors in the roles of the Fathers, a prince who speaks from beyond the theatre sky and a cello that crosses the stage to tell with his music the poetry of this clash between old and new.
Together with all of them, in this eternal struggle between Montagues and Capulets, but also between Fathers and Sons, young and old, reality and imagination: football. Not the spectacular one of the mass media, but the one of the matches in the squares under the houses, in the streets, in the corners of the neighbourhoods, with deflated balloons or empty cans, with the vests used as posts and parents who still burst in to say you have to go away, dinner is ready and you can finish the game the next day. The next day? And how to explain to the world that sometimes games never end?
Therefore Romeo and Juliet stops being a love story and becomes what it most deeply is: a story, as Pasolini would say, of unhappy young people, a story of not listening, of trans-generational failure, of mistakes that have been acknowledged too late and of a too inflexible time in its inexorable flow.