What does it look like, a Portrait of the artist after his death. ? A virtuous exercise that sows doubts, cultivates confusion and observes, with feigned serenity, how the public’s uncertainties flourish. Written and directed by Davide Carnevali, an Italian born in 1981, this demonic work reminds, at the Théâtre de la Bastille, in Paris, to what extent contemporary dramaturgy needs living authors to regenerate.
Portrait of the artist after his death. It is a nugget thoughtfully thought out, developed with subtlety and played with delicacy. If this intriguing text revitalizes writing, it is because it is not written in stone. The author adapts it to the nationality of the person who embodies it. In this case, it is an actor born in Argentina, Marcial Di Fonzo Bo, who unfolds the lines of flight of a fable built on successive incrustations according to a principle dear to Pirandello: mise en abyss.
Only on a stage where two technicians work, the actor introduces himself during a brief monologue (improvised, he explains). What’s his name, where he was born, what year. How one day he received a letter addressed to Mar-z-ial Di Fonzo Bo (the typographical error is significant) to inform him that he had just inherited an apartment in Buenos Aires. Finally, how this event, told to Davide Carnevali, whom he met by chance, would awaken in the author the desire to write, tailored, a piece for the performer. She will be inspired by this mysterious apartment.
Apartment full of ghosts
This apartment, here it is. He is there on the set, displayed on a stage. A normal interior with an armchair, kitchen, desk and wooden walls. A deserted place, but it will not continue to be so, since the narrative will populate it with ghosts: those of the protagonists who supposedly lived there and whose daily life, imagined by the actor, provides grist to the mill of an exponential dramaturgy. .
Di Fonzo Bo explains: he and Carnevali rent a soulless Airbnb in Buenos Aires. When Carnevali falls ill, he must alone lead an investigation whose ramifications range from Argentina under the dictatorship to the hunt for Jews in Europe during World War II. This investigation is protean: police, topographical, historical, psychiatric and above all theoretical, in the sense that its objective (barely hidden) is to explore the possibilities of fiction. How far can a literary creation go to derail reality and our perception of it?
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