Taken from the novel “Farewell Ghosts” by Nadia Terranova (Einaudi, 2018)

Concept by Chiara Lagani and Luigi De Angelis | Playwright Chiara Lagani | Direction, Set Design and Lighting Luigi De Angelis | Starring Anna Bonaiuto and Valentina Cervi | Music and Sound Design Emanuele Wiltsch Barberio | Costumes Chiara Lagani | Featuring the voices of Mirto Baliani, Consuelo Battiston, Silvio Lagani, Marco Molduzzi, Margherita Mordini, Rodolfo Sacchettini | Sound and Technical Supervision Mirto Baliani | Stagehand Raffaele Basile | Organization Maria Donnoli, Marco Molduzzi, Gianni Parrella | Administration Morena Lenti, Riccardo Rossi, Stefano Toma | Logistics Marcella Santomassimo | Distribution Isabella Borettini | Image Mayumi Terada (curtain 010402) | Artwork Paolo Banzola | A production of Ravenna Festival, E Production/Fanny & Alexander, Infinito Produzioni, Progetto Goldstein, Argot Produzioni | Thanks to Moellhausen fragrances, Valerio Vigliar | Special thanks to Nadia Terranova

“Goodbye Ghosts” is the story of a woman, Ida Laquidara, grappling with the void of an absence: her father, one day when she was a child, left home and never returned. Many years later, Ida, who now lives in Rome, is suddenly called back to Messina, her hometown, by her mother: the woman needs to renovate the family home, which she wants to sell, and needs her help. That trip will bring all her ghosts back to life, in a crescendo of anxieties fueled by her unresolved relationship with her mother. After “My Brilliant Friend,” Fanny & Alexander brings to the stage the novel by Nadia Terranova, finalist for the 2019 Strega Prize, focusing on the relationship between two women, a daughter and a mother, embodied on stage by two exceptional actresses, Anna Bonaiuto and Valentina Cervi.

Year : 2022

Service : Set and lighting design

PRESS REVIEW ANNA BANDETTINI

The ghosts of Anna Bonaiuto and Valentina Cervi, two women daughters of anger GIANNI MANZELLA, “Goodbye ghosts”, the original trauma that hides family secrets,

 “The Ghosts of Anna Bonaiuto and Valentina Cervi, Two Women Born from Rage.”

Two talented and popular actresses: one who is special, like Anna Bonaiuto, and this is immediately clear as soon as she steps on stage; the other, Valentina Cervi, a daughter and granddaughter of artists, one of the best performers in television and auteur cinema (her husband, Stefano Mordini, is a filmmaker too), who now exorcises her debut in theater with a distinctive piece.

They appear together with freshness and complicity in the two beautiful female characters of Addio Fantasmi, the novel by Nadia Terranova, a 2018 bestseller (Einaudi), finalist for the Strega Prize. The play, adapted by Chiara Lagani (who also worked on the dramaturgy and costumes) and directed by Luigi De Angelis, the duo behind Fanny & Alexander, was staged at the Ravenna Festival, which is also a co-producer. It will also be performed on the 23rd at Kilowatt Festival (this year held in both San Sepolcro and Cortona), on the 30th at the Orestiadi in Gibellina, and on August 9th in La Spezia.

The novel about Ida and her mother, reunited in their old house in Messina, where they once shared their unhappiness and which now needs to be cleared out, reorganized, and sold, becomes a duet of loneliness. The man of the house disappeared many years ago, and the two women each claim a request for salvation that is lost in emptiness. Completely different women, they float as rivals in the moving routine that will never happen, amid pain and deep resentments. It is almost a challenge for Bonaiuto, whose hair is strictly white, who smokes, capturing the essence of this mother and presenting her with a fierce self-pity behind the apparent maternal love, cruel in her overcompensating actions (and what an inventive actress she is), in both the good and bad like so many mothers. Cervi doesn’t settle for just playing the angry daughter; she finds the frustrations that were lived in that house, restless for not having resolved them, and gives Ida that disarmed appearance which usually hides the true, fierce torturer inside.

It’s interesting that both are guided by a very strict directorial structure: through earpieces, they listen to themselves perform and to the director who guides their movements. It’s not madness or virtuosity, but rather an embrace of the transformative power of theater, because this technique pushes toward simplicity, aligning with the minimalist stage design, which is functional and sparse, with only two chairs and a small table. There are many moments of estrangement, and a wave of pain that moves through the entire hour-long performance, slow and random, like the rippling of cloths that define the scene, perfectly embodying the breath of the novel.

After all, the comparison with literature is an important part of Fanny & Alexander’s path, filled with even more experimental successes (Ada by Nabokov, Alice, The Wizard of Oz). They are celebrating thirty years of collaborations, contaminations, and performances that have made an impact on Italian theater. They will be celebrated throughout 2022-2023, with performances being revived, and among their many initiatives, the debut of Maternità with Chiara Lagani and the new production of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, directed by Luigi De Angelis, starting on November 13th at the Comunale Theater in Bologna.

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“Addio Fantasmi,” the Original Trauma that Hides Family Secrets.

An insistent wind blows across the stage of Addio Fantasmi. It continuously makes the light curtains sway, folding from above and enclosing a neutral space—empty but not closed off from the outside. In fact, those floating walls are easily crossed, they are permeable to voices coming from outside, and one can even respond from within.

Inside, there are only a couple of armchairs, where one can sit perched on the edge, with the cautious posture of someone who has learned to be defensive, or settle comfortably to mask a deeper discomfort. In the middle, almost marking a boundary or no-man’s-land, a small table with an old telephone seems to date the action back in time, or perhaps signify that the time of this house has remained behind, no longer in sync with the present.

A house full of unhappiness, says the daughter at another moment. The performance, directed by Luigi De Angelis and with the dramatic work by Chiara Lagani, is an adaptation of Nadia Terranova’s novel published a few years ago by Einaudi.

BUT ONCE UTTERED, these two words crumble, lose their substance, and become ghosts themselves. The house, which for the mother is still “ours,” the house of a family that has long ceased to exist, has been renounced by the daughter, who moved to Rome. There, she has a family and a husband who occasionally calls on the phone. And the return is not really such; she has no interest in why her mother called her to Messina, to choose what to save among her things before the house is sold. Apart from a mysterious red box, she could throw everything away. In fact, her return is more of an escape from the home that no longer exists. Perhaps because Ida is one of those people who, as Elsa Morante once said, have two types of blood running through their veins, and when they are here, they wish to be there, and when they are there, they wish to be here. And this is what makes her somewhat endearing. And here they are, one facing the other. The mother, elegant in her dark dress, her silver bob always neat; while Ida, who is the narrator in the novel, still acts a bit like a girl, somewhat messy, sitting awkwardly on the armchair, the folds of her light dress never quite in place. On stage are two impeccable actresses: the great Anna Bonaiuto, who veils her pain behind a mask of pragmatism, and Valentina Cervi, who carries a demanding name with ease and discreetly tests herself on stage (specifically at the Teatro Alighieri for the Ravenna Festival), after much work in film and television. If there is a non-phantasmal return, it can be said to be to a theater that makes the actor’s art its core, and perhaps transmits some discomfort, a note that slips into thought, amid the overwhelming theater of consensus that surrounds us from every side.

In short, if one initially thought of the beautiful Terremoto with mother and daughter from several seasons ago, thanks to the powerful presence of Anna Bonaiuto, upon closer inspection, the distance between the two works is clear. In Terremoto, in Fabrizia Rainondino’s first theatrical work, it was all about tenaciously following the thread of memory, and the house reflecting the sentiment of life was the one destroyed by the earthquake that mother and daughter had to leave, not the “horrible” house they now lived in. Here, memory is a cruel sister, a battleground for bloody confrontation. Do you remember? Even memories don’t match, not even the one of the film they watched together. And, slowly but inevitably, the original trauma comes out—unspoken, lingering from the start. One morning, the father left, never to return, and now who knows where he is, or if he’s still alive. Even in dreams, he continues to disappear. Did you love each other? A love wound never heals. And the confrontation must happen.

Afterward, one might allow themselves the attempt of an embrace, perhaps accompanied by a plate of rigatoni with eggplant. And say goodbye like that, to the phantom words, swept away by a light breeze. While Terremoto with mother and daughter was a story of a painful separation between mother and daughter, and also the mother’s separation from her youth, when she still felt like a daughter, Addio Fantasmi speaks of a possible reconciliation in that here and there between the mental spaces we can call Messina and Rome.