Molière – The art of mockery

MOLIÈRE – THE ART OF BEFFA

Freely inspired by: “The life of Mr. de Molière” by Michail Bulgakov
by: Francesco Niccolini
dramaturgy: Roberto Aldorasi, Alessio Boni, Francesco Niccolini and Marcello Prayer
direction: Roberto Aldorasi, Alessio Boni, Marcello Prayer
production: New Theatre
in collaboration with: Teatro Stabile del Friuli Venezia Giulia

He was destined to become a upholsterer like his father, but his grandfather led him to see the street shows of Italian comedians and he, as soon as he was big enough, gave himself to the theater.
His first company was such a disaster that cost him the prison for debt.
His father took him out of prison and he left with a traveling theater. For fifteen years he went around France and, besides being an actor, he also became author, before terrible tragedies, then he became so brilliant and fun to bring him back to Paris to act for Louis XIV, the Sun King.
From that moment on, he was the man of theater most loved by the King and the Parisian public, but also the most hated by all the others: envious actors, courtiers, academics bigots, medical lawyers, hypocritical men of faith, dishonest merchants, betrayed husbands, women always too fashionable, intellectuals salons and many others swore him revenge because he covered them with ridicule on stage and castigafini, with them.
Someone wrote that his theatre turned Parisian artisans and shopkeepers into the people who, a century later, made the first great revolution in Europe, the French Revolution.
He certainly revolutionized the theatre. Commedia after play his characters became real: no more masks, but women and men alive. The scene became a deforming and sincere mirror of reality, a privileged place where it is allowed to laugh at everything, even the painful wounds that the modern era opened in consciences.
His irreverent creative madness knocked at the door of the tragic, scandal and gossip around his works and his private life increased, as the number of his years.
His enemies became too many, censorship did not give him peace, the tastes of the king began to change and the people he loved most began to betray him, but he did not stop fighting like a lion for his theatre and his company, writing his most famous masterpieces.
If his life seems out of a novel, his death is no less: he died on stage, where he lived, among the laughter of the public and the unbelief of his actors.
After the secret funeral reserved for actors who did not abiurate their profession, when 100 years after the new Republican France sought their tomb to transfer their body to a mausoleum dedicated to the most illustrious genius of the nation, they could not find it.
There is enough to believe that he is only an imaginary dead and that, alive and modern as his theatre, continues his tour for theatres all over the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, here is Molière!

Opening hours
from Thursday 11 to Saturday 13 February at 21:00
Sunday 14 February at 18:00