On Thursday, 23 May 2024, at 7:30 p.m., Rafael Spregelburd's The Panic, translated by Manuela Cherubini and directed by Jurij Ferrini, makes its national debut at Teatro Gobetti in Turin.
On the stage along with Ferrini are Arianna Scommegna, Simona Bordasco, Roberta Calia, Lucia Limonta, Elisabetta Mazzullo, Viola Marietti, Francesca Osso, Michele Puleio, and Dalila Reas. Sets and costumes are by Anna Varaldo, lighting by Alessandro Verazzi, sound by Gian Andrea Francescutti. Assistant director Carla Carucci. The show produced by the Teatro Stabile di Torino - Teatro Nazionale, will be performed until Sunday, June 9, 2024.
For the award-winning Argentine author Rafael Spregelburd, panic is nothing more than the modern translation of the sin of sloth: that state of mind that is generated among people scrambling to chase a life divided between two or three jobs, and who are scrambling as best they can and searching like mad - this is the case of the protagonists - for the lost keys to a phantom safe deposit box.
A ridiculous panic grips everyone, as if the characters are never present to themselves and confusingly and obsessively retrace their steps, trying to start over. A whirlwind play that Jurij Ferrini has decided to tackle, having already successfully staged another Spregelburd masterpiece, Lucido.
In Rafael Spregelburd's dramaturgy, I found new and essential themes, which contrast with those of our Western world, tied to the family, interpersonal relationships, the drama bourgeois. His are authentic, modern theatrical challenges with large female roles: in The Panic eight women and two men are on stage, but the ratio returns in much of his comedies.
His comedy is caustic; ruthless; unfair to the inhabitants of that part of the globe that answers to the West, and the writing revolves around an element that is difficult for us Europeans to deal with: paradox. Paradox is an expression of the South American matrix, a world of strong contradictions, populated by generations of people emigrating from the old continent.
Paradox both permeates and enriches his lyrics: if in our Italy the family is still an element that unites, he utilises it not only to undermine its role, but to shatter one by one our certainties through that which apparently cannot be explained, but exists.
We approach his texts through an almost pop first reading, with stories that from the beginning are exaggerated in tone and nuances, to gradually reveal internal connections. The changes' suddenness, the turns, belong to the existence: we are in Euclidean geometry and he is already at the fractal theory.
Jurij Ferrini
Photo: Luigi De Palma
