15 October - 2 November 2008 / Mercadante Theatre, Naples
Remo Girone in
Don Juan back from the war
translation by Teodoro Scamardi
direction Carlo Cerciello
with Daria Pascal Attolini, Monica Bauco, Francesca Caratozzolo,
Isabella Carloni, Angela De Matteo, Desirée Giorgetti,
Milvia Marigliano, Valentina Picello, Alessia Vicardi
music Paolo Coletta
scenery Roberto Crea
costumes Daniela Ciancio
sound Hubert Westkemper
lights Giorgio Cervesi Ripa
assistant director Eugenio Dura
stage-director Alessandro Amatucci
musician collaborator Mariano Bellopede
assistant scenographer Michele Gigi
assistant costumes Daniela Salernitano
lights Peppe Cino
stagehand Enzo Palmieri, Luigi Sabatino
sound engineer Cesare Gardini
stage sound Diego Iacuz
dressmaker Giovanna Napolitano
director assistants Giusy Crescenzo, Valeria Frallicciardi
scene photographs Marco Ghidelli
a production Mercadante Theatre, Naples
It is a journey in the existential and sentimental confusion of the eighteenth century man, who loses his identity in an age of transformation and transit. Horvàth places his Don Juan in a world that is drawing to the tragedy of the Nazism and the mythical character, in his last journey, crossing the German society in the middle of a disintegration period of values and ideals, isn't able to keep up with a past from which he wants to redeem himself, a present in which he doesn't recognize himself and a future which he doesn't accept to belong to. Women are charmed by the nothing that his sentimental fragility hides, but no one of them loves him and everyone forsakes him to his sentimental desert.
He represents the transgression and in this way he attracts, as model of sentimental disorder, guardian of the transience of life, of her uselessness, but, for the same reasons he' s not destined to love. Don Juan moves in a "scene-world" where act female ghosts of his past-present, characters and not people, pathetic and empty narcissist of the end millennium, wrecks of real and existential wars.
Hunter that becomes prey, Don Juan as big conqueror of Spanish legend, now can only claim the conquest of a packet of Egyptian cigarettes. Round him a kind of a lower middle-class matriarchy, narrow-minded and superficial, that doesn't realize the empty in which it moves and the imminent appalling tragedy. This Don Juan, pursuer of a dead love, in a world in which perpetual wars and inflations cause the transmutation and loss of all values, can do nothing but let himself die, and this marks the end of his myth and the birth of a cynic and violent world, in which the word love loses definitively his meaning.
Carlo Cerciello