Silvio d’Amico National Academy of Dramatics Arts, founded in 1936, plays a key role in the training of young Italian actors, directors and dramaturgs. Thanks to its variety of teaching techniques, the Academy, which is currently directed by Daniela Bortignoni, offers to its students the possibility to learn from professional figures of the Italian theatre and cinema, as Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, Francesca Archibugi, Arturo Cirillo and Massimiliano Civica, merging the tradition and the contemporary scenery. Another important focus of the Academy is to direct its students towards a concrete vision of the working world.
Moreover, the Academy stimulates and encourages artistic dialogue by taking part in many different theatre festivals, such as Festival ContaminAzioni, organized by a team of students, and the annual international festival European Young Theatre, held on the occasion of Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto.
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The Maids
In a middle-class flat, the maids, Claire and Solange, are organizing their landlady murder. Thanks to a series of anonymous letters, they manage to arrest the lady’s lover. However, they receive a phone call which informs them of his next release: their conspiracy is about to be unmasked. Genet draws a complex structure in which the maids develop a dependency so deep towards the ladyland that remains chained to the very idea of the Lady. Their existence becomes a degraded ramification of the woman’s gestures and words, towards which they experience a feeling of love and hate. The maids are trapped in an emulation game that ceases to exist as soon as the landlady comes home. The multiple assassination attempts fail, forcing them to the only solution: suicide.
A room forgotten in a twentieth-century short-sighted, in decadence it maintains the dignity of a queen. Air is fetid, heavy, stagnant. On the walls a heavy, crumpled green velvet. The flowers are burned by time, and the maids, full of sweat, are the only master, princesses of the dust. The servants are slaves of their own rite, withered in clumsy, withered gestures. The initial picture is the first round, a close-up of reality, broken by the breaking of the game, which opens the door to another reality/game. The new group was born from the breaking of the imagination: the game of the servant/mistress and the servant/servant. The concentric structure proceeds from the short circled in the structure itself. The crack is a glimpse of reality, but Clare and Solange live in their stories, aimed at that one moment of sanctity and violence, before the murder of the Lady. On the scene, like gears of a music box, the specific mechanism repeats itself identical to itself, in a Cubist superimposition of real and imaginary.
The members of Mat-Off start to cooperate in 2017 at the Silvio d’Amico National Academy of Dramatic Arts, when they worked together on Pinter’s “Mountain Language”. In 2018 they staged the vaudeville “L’Affaire de Rue de Lourcine” by Labiche, whit the supervision of Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, and “In alto il sole in basso” an unpublished play written by the young playwright Andrea Dante Benazzo. The members of Mat-Off start together an expressionist research about languages of the grotesque. With “The Maids”, the first shared direction, they won Premio Nazionale delle Arti 2018 as best directors. In 2019, with other students of Silvio d’Amico, they played “When Five Years Pass” by Federico Garcia Lorca with the supervision of the actor and director Arturo Cirillo, and in October 2019 “Alice” inspired by Lewis Carroll, both shows were about the dreamlike kingdom.
Author: Jean Genet
Translation: Giorgio Caproni
Director: Caterina Dazzi, Michele Eburnea
Dramaturgy: Caterina Dazzi, Michele Eburnea
Photo: Federica Di Benedetto
Cast:
Madame – Michele Eburnea
Claire – Sara Mafodda
Solange – Mersila Sokoli
