Ecuba
teatro gobetti
from 16/03/2010 to 21/03/2010
by Euripides
adapted and directed by Carlo Cerciello
with Isa Danieli
and
Franco Acampora, Fortunato Cerlino, Ciro Damiano, Niko Mucci, Imma Villa, Raffaele Ausiello, Caterina Pontrandolfo, Autilia Ranieri, Daniela Vitale
stage design Roberto Crea
costumes Daniela Ciancio
music Paolo Coletta
lighting Cesare Accetta
Gli Ipocriti
For director Carlo Cerciello, Euripides’ Hecuba is a “tragedy of innocent victims and sacrificial lambs, children”. In his production, the queen of Troy, one of Euripides’ more complex characters, is brought to life by the words and gestures of a great actress, Isa Danieli.
Hecuba, a tormented mother who is set on revenge, holds the key to the tragedy, a powerful metaphor of human instability: “It is never right that those in power should abuse it/ or when enjoying good fortune should suppose it will always be so:/ I was also happy once, but am not now/ and a single day took all my joy away.”
Mater dolorosa but also a woman with a very lucid intelligence, Hecuba watches the tragedy of her children, unable to intervene: Polyxena, a victim of man’s law, is sacrificed on the orders of the spirit of Achilles; Polydor, whose corpse is returned by the waves of the sea, is killed by the Thracian Polymestor, to whom his father had sent him with a load of gold. And it is the children, betrayed and killed by their hosts, or sacrificed in the name of revenge, tribal laws, political or military constraints, who become goods for exchange, and no longer a hope for the future. Hecuba, a woman, a slave without a country, takes her own sterile revenge through the death of the children of the murderer Polymestor, in a vicious circle of pain and misfortune which even the end of the tragedy is unable to stop. But Cerciello reveals a close link between the thirst for revenge in Euripides’ text and the bloody brutality of news stories today: “A chain of deaths calls for revenge, like in criminal feuds or wars between families, where in the name of honour and family ties you can obtain ‘satisfaction’ for an offence received. Hecuba, formerly a powerful woman, does not hesitate to demand from Agamemnon, the person who has destroyed her family and reduced it to slavery, the ‘favour’ of being allowed to settle accounts with Polymestor, one of her ‘friends’, who killed her son Polydor, to strip him of the family gold. Hecuba is a tragic loser, a black grain of hatred and desperation, who drowns her mad torment in blood. She is the protagonist of a tragedy without catharsis, where the remains of a terminal humanity react, incapable of the least dignified redemption.”
Running time: 1.30 h
Performance times:
Weekdays 8.45 p.m. - Sundays 3.30 p.m.
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