Rodolfo Sacchettini, Empty Rooms, in the Dark: The Challenge of Fanny & Alexander
Andrea Nanni, Nabokov: Incestuous Passions on the Borders of Literature
Maria Grazia Gregori, Aqua Marina
Piersandra Di Matteo, Aqua Marina

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Empty Rooms, in the Dark: The Challenge of Fanny & Alexander by Rodolfo Sacchettini, Lo Straniero, May 2005

Another piece is added to the mosaic of the Ravenna-based group Fanny & Alexander. Following Ardis I, Ardis II, and musical preludes, the Ada project (based on Nabokov’s novel) expands with a new vision. Aqua Marina (premiered at Teatro Goldoni in Bagnacavallo) follows the previous stages but revisits the story’s origins, lost in the painful events of the twin sisters Aqua and Marina (both in love with the same man, Demon/Marco Cavalcoli), who are the false and true mothers of the novel’s protagonists: Ada and Van (siblings/cousins).

Inside a classic Italian theater, the audience is invited in with a survival kit containing essential instructions for the show, a pencil for solving cryptograms, and a white-and-red pill (hallucinogenic/suicidal?). The curtain is closed. When it opens, it’s only for a moment—long enough for a glowing countdown that begins a “once-upon-a-time,” spelled out letter by letter with spotlights. The immobile and unchanging theater architecture hosts a performance that seems never to start. The scene’s depth is immediately negated by the curtain’s persistent closure, signaling the “show’s” impossibility to begin. Aqua (Chiara Lagani) appears, showing her feet and hands, crouching on the floor, and caressing a teddy bear. Other hands, Marina (Francesca Mazza) dressed in white, soap bubbles, and objects emerge briefly from the curtain’s folds, quickly sucked back into the hidden space. The curtain, once a magical threshold, increasingly becomes an impassable wall where the gaze, flattened, can only play hide and seek, searching for an entry key or a keyhole to peer through.

It’s immediately clear that the dark heart of the story lies in an undiscovered mystery, a secret to be revealed. If the audience accepts the scene’s pact, they must take responsibility for what they see. They must heighten their attention to capture clues, evidence, and coded messages that permeate the show. Though the story seemingly unfolds simply—a marriage, betrayal, and birth (a fantasy one, as a luminous cryptogram warns)—the entire performance revolves around a surface-level question: Who is Van’s mother? But this question mark is only partially about the plot; the stronger impression is that Aqua Marina is a series of questions built through gestures, sounds, and cryptograms.

The story’s enigma is not merely told; it acts as the very diaphragm through which the vision takes shape. As in Cronenberg’s Spider, where a schizophrenic gaze tells a schizophrenic’s story, in Aqua Marina, we view the events of alienation through Aqua’s alienated mind. Everything seemingly simple on stage ultimately appears cracked and encrypted. Every gesture, dialogue, light signal, or musical presence continuously refers to something else, opening up unknown references. This continual “referral” (to nothingness) resembles the curtain revealing only another black curtain, followed by another of sounds, gestures, and words. Opening the curtain becomes like breaking through an open door—impossible without falling into nothingness.

After Ardis II, which dramatized language’s failure amid hypertrophic intelligence, Aqua Marina now appears as a regression, not just in its story. The focus is Aqua’s mind, and the system of connections is traversed as the sole path where the stage’s “parts” and “fragments” gain meaning. If the stage is a nervous tissue, everything is immersed in a strange amniotic liquid that veils the eyes but opens the ears, like in gestation, where sound arrives before light. We are inside a brain and a womb because Aqua Marina is continually drenched, accompanied by water’s dripping sound, a liquid vertigo tracing tears or illness’s paths through the story.

The stage’s pain and distress, like a cryptic cry for help, reach the audience, who, in their anxiety to uncover, face a series of Chinese boxes where the void’s condemnation manifests in elements of the stage—curtain, gestures, lights, words, sounds—that reflect like continuous surfaces, each dissolution revealing painful black holes. If the eye is sucked into the scene, it’s only to lose itself again in the language’s surface.

Aqua Marina, like the entire Ada project, is a challenge Fanny & Alexander issue to the theater. In an age of standardization and conformity, seriously reflecting on theater is rare but vital to avoid stagnation. Behind the curtain folds lies the obscene; look into the darkness and realize the room is empty—everything visible yet void. As in Kim Ki-Duk’s 3-Iron, you feel the obscene breathing down your neck. You understand it lies in your shadowed gaze, in the flat madness and invisibility you can never penetrate.

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Nabokov: Incestuous Passions on the Borders of Literature by Andrea Nanni, Hystrio No. 2, 2005

The Nabokovian journey Fanny & Alexander began about two years ago with Ada—a metanovel celebrating the incestuous passion between Ada and Van, officially cousins but actually half-siblings due to Demon’s relationships with sisters Aqua and Marina—continues towards completion. This triangle, introduced in Nabokov’s novel, is brought (though not staged) by the Ravenna group in Aqua Marina.

Even with a more linear narrative compared to previous episodes, the staging remains allusive and fragmented, depicting the triangle’s existential drift with delicate and fierce precision. Using a minimalist approach, the performance evokes passions and obsessions with stark intensity. The rhythmic curtain—revealing, concealing, and nurturing vision like a placenta—transforms the theater into a mental space echoing Shakespearean, fairy tale, and mythological themes.