Robinsonade

This CapoTrave’s “operetta” (lasting less than an hour) uses metaphors and it is blazing the real spectrum of new poverty, of so many people overwhelmed by almost international crises, that suddenly find themselves marginalized, forced to beg, to change lifestyle. Robinsonade holds up well, it has pace and intensity. Powerful interpretations by the talented Simone Faloppa and Pietro Naglieri. (Andrea Porcheddu, www.delteatro.it, 24 August 2009)

One hundred pounds of foam and over a thousand plastic bags are the props of “Robinsonade”, a hallucinatory and sharp production that invades the stage with its electric sphere, relegating to the margins of its magic circle the audience, physically involved in taking part in its own wreck.
It is really hard not to identify with the man who emerges from this mountain of white debris, synthetic like the life we lead.
A sort of Robinson Crusoe dressed as manager, the survivor (Pietro Naglieri) fumbles, searches, looks around, trying to understand why the hands of time have stopped.
Until he meets the gaze of another man, the only inhabitant of the island, the modern take on Friday (Simone Faloppa), the companion of Robinson in Defoe’s novel.
The two of them will play an indecipherable game that reminds us, for its slow, pointless moves, the condition described by the memorable Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”.
This show of the Tuscan company Capotrave, by Lucia Franchi and Luca Ricci (also director), is prickly and delicate at the same time: with its powerful vividness, it shows us the sinking of sense in a society that thinks itself opulent, but it is planting toxic materials instead, destined to bury us. (Katia Ippaso, January 2009)

The stage (minimal, but straight to the point) is circular, as the stage of a mysterious arena and it leaves no escape; the two actors – Simone Faloppa and Pietro Naglieri are very good to hold a text three quarters silent- are scrambling to fight their way back and they face themselves (in the sense of “they themselves”), by introducing an unsuccessful search of the calm light of their own. This and much more in this performance. To say that there is an unspoken world that deserves to be understood: do not say, but revealing, little by little, as does the excellent direction that creates a “director’s itinerary”, action after action, a sense of achievement, not explosion, but expansion of understanding. A show of surprise, fear, frenzy, even resignation, claustrophobia: there are many feelings that this little gem brings up and leaves uncovered; it’s a pleasure to watch it, because it is stimulating, it provokes, it shows symbols, it leads us to reflect and give answers. What more can you ask this company called Capotrave who performs with the theater, with culture, with the intelligence a political act to such great effect? You can ask, not to them but to the public, to go and see, look for it everywhere, take advantage of these few days to treat yourself to the possibility, again, to discover the value of intelligence. (Simone Nebbia, www.teatroteatro.it, October 2008 )

What would have happened if Robinson Crusoe had been shipwrecked on an island made of plastic bags, trash, waste, instead of joining in the nature described by Defoe?
It is the significant and disturbing vision that offers us “Robinsonade”, where the relationship with nature and the environment changes its sign but remains hostile: in the novel there is a wilderness to tame, here a rotten environment where one can hardly find anything to survive.
The public is invited to stand in a circle around the island, a circular structure made entirely of plastic bags, into which a cautious and taciturn Robinson and a hysterical and loquacious Friday, longtime resident of the island, move. Friday reminds Crusoe of the causes that first have driven him, dirty and unkempt social parasite, and now Robinson, representative of the white middle-class consumer culture, out of society, adrift in the sea of garbage created by the blind opulence of the West. Human waste among plastic waste. The magic formula of an exclusionary society.
The show is enhanced by the interpretations of Simone Faloppa’s energetic Friday and Pietro Naglieri’s grotesque Robinson. (Graziano Graziani, Carta, 29 August – 4 September 2008)