Four plays on live streaming
In April, in the middle of the lockdown, Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione and the Pippo Delbono Theatre Company took part in the #laculturanonsiferma program, a digital festival created by the Emilia Romagna Region with the local cultural authorities. Four plays from the company’s repertoire have been made available for free viewing online.
It is therefore now possible to view the shows Questo buio feroce, Dopo la battaglia, Orchidee and Vangelo for free on Vimeo / ERT with the possibility to choose subtitles in different languages. The videos will be accessible until 30 September 2020.
QUESTO BUIO FEROCE – A man, a writer, in 1993 discovers to his surprise (his sporadic homosexual adventures dated back to the sixties and seventies, and since 1977 he hadn’t engaged in any risky activities), that he had AIDS, which at that time was a death sentence. This man is Harold Brodkey, one of the most sublime contemporary writers, and the “story … of his death” becomes not so much a diary of facts (the progress of the disease, the physical decay), but the account of two years of a state of perennial creative grace, two years of extraordinary lucidity, two years of “real life”, granted precisely by the imminence of the end.
LINK: https://vimeo.com/407985900
DOPO LA BATTAGLIA – From the collection of writings of the same name by Delbono, director, actor, poet among the best known 
Italian artists in the world. A sort of “Scritti Corsari” of our time, a book that with toughness, lucidity and poetry expresses a strong point of view on today’s Italy, with particular reference to politics, religion, theatre, culture and television.
LINK: https://vimeo.com/408035067
ORCHIDEE – Orchidee by Pippo Delbono could be subtitled: of the true and the false. As the director himself says, the orchid is a flower whose beauty, be it real or artificial, is never understood. Artifice or truth? It is a Hamletic dilemma within which the theatre has always struggled and is still struggling, especially, and with particular ferocity, in the last 150 years.
LINK: https://vimeo.com/408064853
VANGELO – Delbono brings to the stage a personal story that reflects his conflictual relationship with faith. His mother, a fervent Catholic, never accepted her son’s departure from religion, and asked him, even on her deathbed, to create a show dedicated to the Gospel that would convey a message of love to the audience. Pippo Delbono, therefore, decides to fulfil his mother’s desire, but following his own inspiration: Walking, running, dancing between the audience and the stage, he offers his own interpretation of religion and surprises the spectators by having the actors read, shout the passages of the Gospel and connect them to real situations, thus creating a visually effective, but unusual and unconventional work.