It’s Urgent – Deconstructing Love
«It’s urgent – love», once said Eugenio de Andrade, «it’s urgent – a boat upon the sea. It’s urgent to destroy certain words, hate, solitude, and cruelty, some mourning, many swords». Urgent, yes, but not easy, as proven by Pippo Delbono’s latest creation, Amore, a show that «avoids and embraces love», at the same time avoiding any serious reflection on this «gear of the human organism» and embracing a long-standing aesthetic research that impresses, but without living a mark.
The autobiographical element from which each show is born and to which each show returns to is definitely one of the main stylistic peculiarities of Pippo Delbono’s latest productions, as was clearly stated by the author himself in Sangue (2013), where the agony and the death of his mother were the main characters, Vangelo (2016), which bloomed, again, from one of his mother’s death wishes, and La gioia (2018), partially re-written upon the death of his friend and long-time collaborator Bobò. It is not a case, then, that his latest production, Amore, which premiered in Modena’s Teatro Storchi last year, stems from a personal loss, «a mourning of love [Delbono] cannot talk about still (sic!)», which leaves behind «words, music and poems from this land, Portugal, where everything is filled with love».
Conceived during the pandemic, this «walking song» vagrantly follows in the footsteps of a word, “love”, wandering among the lyricisms of Carlos Drummond De Andrade, Daniel Filipe or Rainer Maria Rilke, the heartfelt nostalgia of Fado’s laments and the desperate movements of the company’s thespians, thus delivering a saturnine representation of this «utterly human quality» that has been «long-time absent in the public discourse».
Indeed, through simple yet ingenious light and set designs, Delbono manages to create a deeply evocative environment in which his cavernous voice and the weeping guitar of flawless Pedro Jóia alternate with the thunderous roars of fadista Miguel Ramos and the sombre choreographies of the other interpreters, ferrying the audience to and fro the murky waters of love and grief.
Offering a cornucopia of references that range from Andrei Tarkovsky’s third and last film as Soviet expatriate, The Sacrifice, to Angola’s only folk song about love (written by Artur Nunes and sang in Kimbundu by versatile Aline Frazão), Amore, can be seen as yet another attempt to create a catharsis, a therapeutic liberation from pain in which the actor and director becomes a psychopompos for the living, a guide of souls that suffers in his struggle to lead back to a waking life the numbed minds of our distracted, dying society.
As already noted in Vangelo, however, Delbono’s artistic elegies are often too restless to attain the sublimation and purification that the white-clad actor seems to find for himself when he lays under the sprouting dead tree on the scene.
Indeed, the once anarchic and revolutionary artist who so deeply influenced Italy’s theatrical environment in the 90s and early 2000s appears to have now turned into a high priest of his own secular religion, seemingly self-blinded by the repetition of spoiled gestures and dramaturgical non sequitur that create safe, fleeting images capable only of reassuring the audience and reconfirming its bourgeois worldview, rather than questioning it. As a matter of fact, the few attempts at introducing the «scary» concepts of obsessive («Love is a dictatorship») and possessive love (the naked woman embellished and thus owned by men) are easily bedimmed by the pompous, hectic aesthetics of the play, leaving space only to a rather banal, prêt-a-consommer portrayal of Love.
The show is still playing at
Sāo Luiz Teatro Municipal
rua António Maria Cardoso 38 – Lisbon
from 8 to 12 November 2022
Tuesday to Saturday
20:00Compagnia Pippo Delbono presents
Amore
conceived and directed by Pippo Delbonowith Dolly Albertin, Gianluca Ballarè, Margherita Clemente, Pippo Delbono, Ilaria Distante, Aline Frazão, Mario Intruglio, Pedro Jóia, Nelson Lariccia, Gianni Parenti, Miguel Ramos, Pepe Robledo, Grazia Spinella
original music by Pedro Jóia and various artists
set Joana Villaverde
costumes Elena Giampaoli
lights Orlando Bolognesi
literary consultancy Tiago Bartolomeu Costa
sound Pietro Tirella
head machinist Enrico Zucchelli
head of the project in Portugal Renzo Barsotti
production manager Alessandra Vinanti
organisation Silvia Cassanelli
tour manager Davide Martini
tour technical manager Fabio Sajiz
tour technical staff sound Giulio Antognini
volunteer assistant in Portugal Susana Silverio
photographers Luca Del Pia, Estelle Valente (Teatro São Luiz)
executive producer Emilia Romagna Teatro ERT / Teatro Nazionale (Italy)
associated co-producers São Luiz Teatro Municipal – Lisbona, Pirilampo Artes Lda, Câmara Municipal de Setúbal, Rota Clandestina, República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes (Portogallo), Fondazione Teatro Metastasio di Prato (Italia)
in coproduction with Teatro Coliseo, Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Buenos Aires e ItaliaXXI – Buenos Aires (Argentina), Comédie de Genève (Svizzera), Théâtre de Liège (Belgio), Les 2 Scènes – Scène Nationale de Besançon (Francia), KVS Bruxelles (Belgio), Sibiu International Theatre Festival/Radu Stanca National Theater (Romania)
with the support of Ministero della Cultura (Italia)
special thanks for the costumes for the rehearsals to São Luiz Teatro Municipal in Lisbon, Théâtre de Liège, Compagnia Teatro O Bando
