After Reality (2012), 2013’s Ce ne andiamo per non darvi altre preoccupazioni (We’re Leaving So You Don’t Have To Worry Anymore) and Il cielo non è un fondale (The Sky Is Not a Backdrop) from 2016, Daria Deflorian and Antonio Tagliarini – winners of the 2014 Ubu prize awarded for innovation in drama – return to REf with Quasi niente (Almost Nothing), a new production inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert.
On stage are three women and two men working around the figure of Giuliana, wife and mother, played in the film by a young Monica Vitti. It is she, ‘a wild woman in elegant clothing’, who takes charge of that marginality that has always attracted the two artists, who are fundamental to reading the whole world. Because Quasi niente speaks to us not only of discomfort, of fragility, of cracks in reality but also of the childhood of a woman that the world no longer seems interested in hearing.
In the background is a sick society, devoid of imagination and crushed by the ‘capitalist realism’ that has suppressed every past and mortgaged every future. It is up to the theatre, with its ‘impotent fantasising’ to act once again as a hinge between inside and out, between the image and the real lying beneath.
