It is always worth seeing or (re-seeing) the great theater classics on stage, especially if performed without forced scenic or textual updates that risk diluting their essence in winks to contemporary sensibilities that in most cases do not stand up to comparison with the original work. We must not be afraid to represent the classics by presenting them as such, but we must trust in their ability to still speak of us despite the passing of time and the changed social, epochal and cultural situations. The historic artistic duo formed by Elena Bucci and Marco Sgrosso have chosen to follow this path with good reason in the representation of “Rosmersholm” by Henrik Ibsen (1828, Skien – Oslo, 1906), scheduled at the Teatro Storchi in Modena until February 16, 2025.
“Rosmersholm” by Henrik Ibsen, project and dramaturgical development Elena Bucci and Marco Sgrosso, ph Ilaria Costanzo, courtesy ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro
The play by the Swedish playwright, written in 1886 and belonging to the most social phase of Ibsen’s theatre, focuses on a complex convergence of national history and psychological introspection and was chosen for its relevance to our contradictory present, in which, in the words of Elena Bucci, «many civil, political and social conquests that seemed acquired are wavering, where reborn totalitarianisms and wounded democracies clash, where the economy seems to govern every human act, suffocating rights and ideals, where the planet sends unmistakable signals of suffering». The drama, made entirely of dialogue and narration, without any real action taking shape on stage, tells the story of the morbid relationship between former Protestant pastor Johannes Rosmer and Rebecca West, a friend of his deceased wife who moved into the family home when the latter was still alive and secretly responsible, as we immediately understand, for her tragic suicide. In a crescendo of tragedy, which shows the distance between what human beings want and their possibilities, the two end up laying each other bare in front of the audience, revealing the intricate network of passions (including intellectual, ethical and political ones) underlying their apparently static lives.
“Rosmersholm” by Henrik Ibsen, project and dramaturgical development Elena Bucci and Marco Sgrosso, ph Ilaria Costanzo, courtesy ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro
The scenography is effective in its essentiality: at the center of the stage a bouquet of flowers in a glass vase, an allusion to the ornaments of the bourgeois home inhabited by the two, but also a prefiguration of a funereal past and destiny. Then a composition of semi-transparent curtains, which guard the shadows of the characters like crystallized presences even when they have left the scene and which the light dyes with different colors depending on the time of day and the emotional tone of the moment. The Rosmer house is inhabited by many ghosts, first of all that of Beata, driven mad by grief upon learning of her inability to become a mother together with the intuition of her husband’s love for the other woman, but also the ancestors of the family, respected members of the local community under whose superficial integrity we can imagine creeping anxieties and repressions similar to those of the two protagonists and, ultimately, of all of us. A few chairs, which when occupied by the characters active in the dialogues underline their changing relationships and then host them, from behind and not illuminated as if they were suspended thoughts, when they silently attend the dialogues in which they are not involved. It is good the choice of not amplifying the actors’ voices with the microphone, a now widespread custom that, although functional to the fruition, is inevitably distancing, especially in the case of historical works represented, as here, with stage settings and costumes closer to tradition than to contemporaneity. In this regard, the episodic insertion of a recorded vocal track in which the actors’ words echo, almost as if wanting to overwhelm them with the inner voices of their characters’ thoughts and repressed memories, appears deliberately alienating in the sober sound dramaturgy by Raffaele Bassetti.
“Rosmersholm” by Henrik Ibsen, project and dramaturgical development Elena Bucci and Marco Sgrosso, ph Ilaria Costanzo, courtesy ERT – Emilia Romagna Teatro
If the two protagonists, played by Elena Bucci and Marco Sgrosso, maintain a single interpretative register throughout the play, emblematic of their cold, entirely mental passions, the supporting characters are entrusted with the role of reagents of the stage action, with their dazed incursions from a noir tale. Rector Kroll (Emanuele Carucci Viterbi), journalist Peder Mortensgaard (Valerio Pietrovita), political agitator Ulrik Brendel and housekeeper Madama Helseth (Francesco Pennacchia) are lively character typifications that make the public sphere, of which their speeches are an expression, collide with the private one, manifested by their tics and their personal obsessions, the reasons for which intersect inextricably with the first. Taken together, they seem to join together in a dark mechanical ballet as external forces, albeit antagonistic, converge in making Giovanni Rosmer’s lucid madness explode, entrenched in an intellectual and unemotional dimension that protects him from existential shocks, and Rebecca West, animated by a blind will throughout the play aimed at a utopian extremist goal, that of freeing Rosmer from the constraints that prevent him from fully embracing his own inner idealistic reform. The merit of Elena Bucci’s direction is the fact that she leaves ample power to the dramatic text, a true metronome of the stage action, even if perhaps we would have liked to see a more multifaceted and charismatic Rebecca West, less measured in approaching a final climax that chooses not to tear the veil on the dark intimacy of the characters to remain in a dreamy dimension.
Info:
https://modena.emiliaromagnateatro.com/spettacolo/la-casa-dei-rosmer/
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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