CLAUDIA CARDINALE ON STAGE DIRECTED BY SQUITIERI

Starring as the Unknown in Pirandello’s “Come tu mi vuoi - As you desire me” in a cross between theatre and cinema

Claudia Cardinale, awarded the Golden Bear at the latest International Film Festival in Berlin, returns to Italy to debut at Le Muse theatre in Ancona on 18^th October as lead woman in Come tu vuoi - As you desire me by Luigi Pirandello. For the first time, the great French-resident cinema actress will be directed on stage by her husband Pasquale Squitieri.

“I fell in love with the play immediately, - writes Squitieri in his director’s notes, - when, reading it and rereading it, I discovered that the true leading role, the deus ex machina of the affair is Boffi, the photographer. And that the new God, capable of imposing a new religion on the Twentieth Century, a new moral, a new language, is in fact photography”. So self-image is the dramaturgical engine of a performance that the director imagines between cinema and theatre, with a large screen on the stage where excerpts of the more well-known films starring Claudia Cardinale (“Bebo’s Girl”, “The Leopard”) interact with a live performance. But that’s not all. For ten days, last August, Squitieri did some filming at the Tunisian actress’s Roman villa, which he then edited, to begin rehearsals during the second half of September at La Nuova Fenice theatre in Osimo (in the province of Ancona).

“From photography to the cinema, - remarks Squitieri, - from the cinema to television in fact, alter egos are multiplied, identities are cancelled, one takes on a “role”, or even many roles. (…) The Unknown is an image - personified, for Salter, and then for Bruno. She embodies the condition of an alienated woman whom only man can rescue from the curse of anonymity, forcing her however to pass from one subordination to another. She is well aware of this, and shouts rebellion, but surrenders to her condition. She is a Woman only for Mop, Salter’s daughter who many have defined as a lesbian, but who is just a woman in love with another woman. And Mop, as a secondary character, who has almost escaped from the Author’s obsessions for the accusations of an incestuous passion for his daughter Lietta, moralistically cancelled from the second and third act from the sexist ideology that Pirandello inherited from his origins and from reading Weininger, in my opinion becomes the protagonist of the epilogue. Overwhelmed by a schizoid dichotomy that confuses, multiplies, rescues, identity and alter ego; she takes shelter in the stable corporeity of the “replica”, where the I is split up and creates as in Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ ”.

In the program of this production at the Teatro Stabile delle Marche, as per the wishes of general manager Tommaso Paolucci and artistic director Giampiero Solari, Claudia Cardinale performs with Memé Perlini in the role of the photographer Boffi, Franco Molé in the role of the Unknown-prostitute’s companion in Berlin, Fiorella Rubino playing Mop, Marche natives Federico Fazioli (playing Bruno, the Italian officer who thinks he recognises in the Unknown his wife who disappeared during the War), Isabella Carloni, Tiziana Marsili Tosto and Anghela Alò.

The staging, once the drama season at Le Muse has been inaugurated with performances on 19^th and 20^th, will be as follows: 22^nd/24^th October at Fraschini theatre in Pavia, 26^th/27^th October at the Municipal Theatre of Ivrea, 29^th October/3^rd November at Teatro Nuovo in Verona, 5^th/24^th November at Teatro Argentina in Rome, 26^th November/1^st December at the Comunale Verdi theatre in Salerno, 3^rd/16^th December at Diana theatre in Naples, 21^st/26^th January at the Metropolitan in Catania, from January 29^th to February 9^th at Biondo theatre in Palermo, 11^th/16^th February at Vittorio Emanuele theatre in Messina, 18^th/23^rd February at Pirandello theatre in Agrigento, from February 25^th to March 16^th at Teatro Nuovo in Milan (co-producer of the play).