Starting Saturday 7 November in Spoleto, traveling along the entire peninsula, Veronica Cruciani brings her version of The Lover of the British playwright Nobel Prize winner for Literature Harold Pinter, exalting his silences, in an intense and ironic show, produced by Savà Produzioni.
The curtain opens on Sarah and Richard, the two protagonists, apparently an ordinary middle-class couple, with an orderly bourgeois life with a respectable facade.
We meet them for breakfast, and as he gets ready for work, he asks his wife Sarah if her lover would come to visit her today. She informs him that yes, it will indeed pass and she would be grateful if he, Richard, did not come home too soon.
And without revealing too much about Pinter and the storyVeronica Cruciani, instantly immerses us in a marriage based on ambiguity, made up of role-playing games and non-verbal communications; a show in which fiction and reality merge, where the pair of actors, Giorgio Marchesi and Simonetta Solder are a couple in life too.
“Staging Harold Pinter’s Lover today” – says the director – it is an exploration of what couples are today, of what it means to live in a romantic relationship.
Veronica, how is your “Lover”?
“It begins as a sit-com, complete with theme song and comic beats. A sit-comedy which then almost transforms into a noir, with clear references to cinema, including Tarantino, and characters dressed in black and white. We go through different imaginaries, until the parts are dismantled and we find Simonetta and Giorgio, the actress and the actor, acting in some way without these roles.
Pinter stages a wedding, and as in a wedding, even in the theater there are well-defined roles, Sarah and Richard play at being something else than themselves. They stage a real role play to stay together. It is a couple in crisis that exposes this mechanism. If Pinter unmasks the artifice of a relationship, we in truth reveal the artifice of representation, that is, what usually remains hidden from the public gaze. All the aspects that are generally kept hidden in the theater: scene changes, the movements of the stagehand or costume designer, are instead shown here to create a parallel discussion.
The final scene is precisely the fall of this device: the fall of the scenes, the fall of social masks, the fall of the construction. The show reveals itself in its contemporaneity.”
Just as Pinter unmasks this marriage, you unmask the theatrical mechanism.
“Exactly, it’s my direction. The interesting aspect of Pinter is that we tell more with silences than with dialogues. He was convinced, and he reiterated it several times, that we communicate well in our silences, in what is not said. When we speak, and this is also clearly perceived in the dialogues of this show, mainly attempts to escape from ourselves come out. We escape from communication, because entering someone else’s life is something very scary, Pinter argued. Revealing to others what we have inside is perhaps too terrible a possibility.”
Even if the person in front of you is the husband or wife with whom you should have deep intimacy?
“In reality the problem is precisely this, that there is no intimacy. And Sarah and Richard are examples of this. They act out roles, they act out a second life, taking great care to keep the bourgeois marriage well separated from the transgression of the afternoon lover, but in truth they struggle to communicate.
There is an underground conflict that is only made explicit at the end. They never tell each other what they really think, what they really feel.
Silence will reveal the truth, because words are not instruments of clarification and rapprochement, but true acts of power.”
Language is used as a weapon
“This language serves to define the parts, to understand who is leading the game at that moment and who is suffering. Every joke is a lunge, every sentence is a strategy to dominate the other and therefore it becomes a very ferocious text. A very ferocious text even if in several moments a great irony emerges.”
What did you experience new in this text compared to your past works?
“In all my shows there are themes that I am quite obsessed with; one of these is certainly power, the stories that govern us, the theatre, the possibility of changing the narrative and how the narrative can or cannot change reality. I enjoy questioning myself about theatrical language and in this show it is quite evident. I continually play between reality and fiction, tending to blur the boundaries. I did it for example in my show “Quasi Grace” by having Michela play Grazia Deledda Murgia, both Sardinian writers. And this is also the reason why I chose Giorgio and Simonetta, a couple in real life too, in addition to obviously being two extraordinary actors that I respect.
There are many Pinter themes that interest me, but power and how this power passes through a romantic relationship is certainly one of the central issues of my work: I went to investigate, to dig this theme even deeper.
What would you like the audience to take home from your show?
“Intimacy. Intimacy between people, being spontaneous and authentic with the one with whom we enter into a relationship. It is something very precious and often we flee from intimacy out of fear, we mask ourselves, we defend ourselves, we enter into social roles and a representation that does not allow us to be truly intimate, truly spontaneous.”
The desire to drop the mask with your partner
“Not only with your partner, but also in friendship and relationships in general. We live in a society where there are roles and rules, this is without a doubt, but the same society is increasingly represented, multiplied through social media, and it often becomes difficult to meet others.
Intimacy is the only truly free thing we possess: it is an exchange that we allow ourselves with another person without asking for anything in exchange. Simply being intimate and authentic. A dimension that we increasingly risk losing.
So I would like the public to come out wanting to have a really intimate and authentic relationship, whether it’s with a friend, with their husband or wife.”
