THE PRESS: LA REPUBBLICA (Nico Garrone)
The show by Angiola Ianigro and Fernando Toma with Sergio Sandrini. The event of A wall, a tiger that Angiola Ianigro and Fernando Torna staged along the lines of the screenplay for a film also about the lanigro and Heddy Honigmann ("The door of the house") would lend itself to one of the classic Pinterian performances.
The claustrophobic environment of a small apartment, two friends linked by a relationship in crisis, a dripping of small masked aggressions, and the opportunity to get out of the cul-de-sac which, fatally, fades. The friends are called Johan and Karel, they spend the day reading the headlines, dreaming of the evasion that the arrival of a trunk with a legacy of objects and written travel memories, almost the map to discover a hidden treasure, is to unlock. The bags are ready, but then you can't get past the door.
Of this light and slightly anguished plot that in a version more tied to a dramaturgy of the word would follow tried and tested paths, we are looking for solutions, if not really new, certainly different. Purified of any naturalistic trace, immersed in a bath of white light from the operating room, the environment designed by two walls that form a closed perspective, becomes a container of lights that mark obligatory paths. The discomfort, the mutual cruelties, the tearful desire to escape to the outside are given in an indirect, allusive way, as if the life of the two characters in the test tube were made of many pieces that you notice stick together. While the bodies continually split, in the silhouette of their shadows, they lose real consistency outside and inside the wall, and the phrases of the dialogue in playback are recited by the voices of two well-known film voice actors, a sort of large wall-screen animated by passages of the survey creates a third pole of attraction, it travels by anticipating or following the visual assembly of the story.
They are not slides in sequence, and they are not clips of pieces filmed, it is a technological magic lantern developed by Fernando Toma (who also plays, together with Sergio Sandrini, one of the two roles) capable of suggesting multiple tracks and visual rhythms: for example, passing images from one window to another against the background of a total, or magnifying the "slow motion" of an endless dip.
In this labyrinth of illusions and illusions, even the journey sent by the wall, or by other impalpable causes, is reduced to the fetish of a toy: the exotic tiger is a plush tiger, a paper tiger. And the effect is that of a canceled and frozen narrativity, a very cold baroque formalism which, perhaps, in clearing any emotion goes even beyond the intentions of the authors. And most of the pleasure of the spectators.
