Excerpted from the tetralogy My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (Edizioni e/o)

• With: Chiara Lagani and Fiorenza Menni
• Concept by: Luigi De Angelis, Chiara Lagani, Fiorenza Menni
• Dramaturgy: Chiara Lagani
• Direction and Sound Design: Luigi De Angelis
• Sound Supervision: Vincenzo Scorza
• Costumes: Midinette
• Organization and Promotion: Maria Donnoli, Marco Molduzzi
• Administration: Stefano Toma
• Production: E-Fanny&Alexander
• Co-produced with: Ateliersi
• Special Thanks: Andrea Argentieri, Enrico Fedrigoli, Francesca Pizzo, Giorgia Sangineto
• Texts: Part one features excerpts from My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante; part two includes
• writings by Chiara Lagani, freely inspired by Lyman Frank Baum, Toti Scialoja, and Wisława Szymborska.

Year : 2017

Service : Set, Lighting design & Soundtrack

1. My Brilliant Friend: A Reading

In the first novel of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend cycle, two young girls challenge each other by throwing their dolls into the depths of a dark basement. When they go to retrieve them, the dolls are gone. Convinced that Don Achille—the ogre of their childhood—has stolen them, they eventually summon the courage to confront him. In this reading, the two actresses physically embody Ferrante’s text; the story is expressed through their bodies, leaving an indelible imprint on them.

2. The Story of Two Dolls: An Animated Photo-Novel

Here, there are only two dolls—perhaps the lost ones? In the dark, symbolic space where they were abandoned, these figures move and narrate their story without words. What events transpired in that mysterious, unwritten recess (in the story, in the novel) that first welcomed and then caused them to disappear? These dolls have no voice to answer such questions—or even to pose new ones.

They ask no embarrassing questions,
so what do you answer instead of keeping cautious silence?
Or evasively changing the subject of the dream?
Or waking up at the right moment?

—Wisława Szymborska

TOUR

• 21 June 2017 | Teatro Astra, Turin
• 4 July 2017 | Teatro La Cucina, Milan
• 11 October 2017 | Centrale Preneste, Rome
• 19 October 2017 | Teatro delle Passioni, Modena
• 4 November 2017 | Teatro Felix Guattari, Forlì
• 15 November 2017 | Teatro Ca’ Foscari, Venice
• 20 December 2017 | Teatro degli Atti, Rimini
• 21–25 March 2018 | Sì, Bologna
• 8–10 March 2018 | Angelo Mai, Rome
• 16 December 2018 | Teatro Eliso, Nuoro
• 19 January 2019 | Auditorium Le Fornaci, Terranuova Bracciolini (AR)
• 3 March 2019 | Teatro Dei Servi, Massa (MS)
• 29–31 March 2019 | Galleria Toledo, Naples
• 21 July 2019 | Baglio di Stefano, Gibellina (TP)
• 11 April 2025 | Teatro Sociale di Bellinzona, Bellinzona (CH)

[ph. Koen Broos]

PRESS REVIEW

OSVALDO GUERRIERI, LA STAMPA
SARA CHIAPPORI, LA REPUBBLICA
CAMILLA TAGLIABUE, IL FATTO QUOTIDIANO
RENATO PALAZZI, IL SOLE 24 ORE
KATIA IPPASO, IL VENERDÌ DI REPUBBLICA
MARIATERESA SURIANELLO, IL MANIFESTO
MASSIMO MARINO, CORRIERE DI BOLOGNA
GIANLUCA POGGI, GAZZETTA
NICOLA ARRIGONI, SIPARIO
SARAH PERRUCCIO, LEGGENDARIA

My Brilliant Friend Has Lost Her Doll

Osvaldo Guerrieri | La Stampa, June 22, 2017

What do Lila and Lenù look like? “Vanity Fair” asked this recently, anticipating the TV adaptation of My Brilliant Friend by the enigmatic Elena Ferrante. Does it matter? Will they just be typical “TV faces”? While awaiting the answer, the theater offers an advantage over TV and cinema, which are also capitalizing on the vast success of the novels about the sixty-year friendship between Lila and Lenù.

On a sweltering June evening in a stuffy Teatro Astra, the Torino Hills Festival presented the performance No Embarrassing Questions from Them. The title, from Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska, is evocative but misleading. It doesn’t hint at the underlying My Brilliant Friend, a vocal-gestural adaptation by Chiara Lagani and Fiorenza Menni from the Ravenna-based company Fanny & Alexander.

Their ambitious project aims to stage the entire novel cycle within a year, starting with this poignant, mysterious first chapter. The story begins with Lina’s disappearance and flashes back to when Lila and Lenù were children in Naples, testing their courage by, for instance, throwing their dolls into a terrifying basement. When they descend to retrieve them, the dolls are gone.

Lagani and Menni faithfully retell this moment, starting on a bare, black stage dressed in white, narrating the friendship’s origins. In the second part, now in black, they “live” the friendship like a dance, blending Ferrante’s words with nursery rhymes and other literary fragments. The friendship’s mystery unfolds through time’s chaotic waves, marking a remarkable beginning.

Fanny & Alexander Play with Ferrante’s Words

Sara Chiappori | La Repubblica, July 4, 2017

The title, No Embarrassing Questions from Them, comes from a Szymborska verse, yet the work dives into Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. True to their style, Fanny & Alexander—led by Chiara Lagani and Luigi De Angelis—avoid straightforward adaptations, preferring complex, multi-layered projects that resist singular interpretations.

This performance focuses on a pivotal scene: Lila and Lenù, childhood friends in Naples, throw their dolls into a dark basement. Unable to find them, they confront Don Achille, the neighborhood “ogre.” “This moment is the origin of their profound bond,” says Lagani, who also stars alongside Fiorenza Menni. “Reading the novels, I couldn’t help but think of us.”

The show unfolds in two parts. The first recites the text verbatim but splits the narrative voice into two perspectives. The second imagines the dolls’ fate, connecting to Ferrante’s fairy tale The Beach at Night. Here, the dolls “know everything but can’t speak,” embodying a dreamlike, animistic world.

Like their previous works, Fanny & Alexander explore childhood’s enigmatic nature—a biographical riddle of identity, truth, and illusion. Ferrante’s elusive persona also becomes part of this poetic mystery. “Knowing her identity is less interesting than her game of not being found

The Real “Brilliant Friends” Exist, by Katia Ippaso | Il Venerdì di Repubblica, September 29, 2017

“On the day we exchanged dolls for the first time, she, as soon as she had Tina, pushed her beyond the fence and let her fall into the darkness.” In the opening pages of My Brilliant Friend (published by Edizioni e/o), Elena Ferrante introduces the two young girls, Elena and Lila, and their dolls, Tina and Nu. Chiara Lagani, actress and playwright from the renowned company Fanny & Alexander, followed the doll’s descent into darkness, tracing the turbulent story of these two friends and their cloth and celluloid doubles. She envisioned “two figures, first white and then black, in an always black space.”

No Embarrassing Questions from Them, directed and sound-designed by Luigi De Angelis, will be performed on October 11 at Centrale Preneste in Rome as part of the Teatri di Vetro festival. As Lagani explains, the play features excerpts from the first novel of Ferrante’s famous quadrilogy. “In the first part, Fiorenza Menni and I are two children retrieving their dolls from the darkness, using Ferrante’s words. In the second part, we become dolls, speaking verses inspired by Wisława Szymborska, Lyman Frank Baum, and Toti Scialoja. We become two colors merging into one, a single voice with two bodies.”

While the global debate about Elena Ferrante’s true identity continues—with many suspecting the author might actually be writer Domenico Starnone—Lagani defends the mystery. “I don’t want to know what the author looks like; I love the suspense surrounding her and her characters. Initially, I was skeptical about the value of Ferrante’s saga, as I’m not a fan of mainstream literature. But once I started My Brilliant Friend, I couldn’t stop until I finished all four books (The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child). What matters to me is the author’s skill in creating constant tension and an identification mechanism. Who hasn’t had a ‘brilliant friend’?”

The play’s title, No Embarrassing Questions from Them, is taken from a verse by Wisława Szymborska. This theatrical journey is the latest from Fanny & Alexander, the artistic workshop Lagani founded in 1992 with Luigi De Angelis (joined in 1997 by Marco Cavalcoli).

“For us, words, silences, literature, stage action, movements, and sounds are equally significant. Initially, we decided to start with Ferrante’s words. Following the dolls’ story, we found ourselves experimenting with a theatrical dimension where voices multiply,” Lagani concludes. “We embarked on an inner journey where Elena and Lila’s identities overlap and blur because, in true friendship, the other often becomes your double.”

An Author’s Duet Inspired by Ferrante, by Mariateresa Surianello | Il Manifesto, October 14, 2017

There’s no trace of the media frenzy about Elena Ferrante’s identity in the theater piece featuring Chiara Lagani and Fiorenza Menni. These two veterans of Italian experimental theater, from Fanny & Alexander and the former Teatrino Clandestino, have avoided betraying their artistic integrity by engaging with a much-discussed author. No Embarrassing Questions from Them, presented at Centrale Preneste as part of the Teatri di Vetro festival, is a powerful, structured duet inspired by Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend.

In a black-box stage setting, two figures dressed in white move with intricate precision—distinct yet synchronized. They portray the friendship between Elena (the narrator) and Lila, set in a Naples filled with fearful and fascinating places. Their long friendship, marked by both complicity and cruelty, begins when Lila throws Elena’s doll into a dark cellar, and Elena follows suit.

The tension heightens as the girls descend into the terrifying cellar, searching in vain for their lost dolls. In the second part, now dressed in black, the figures seem transformed into the lost dolls themselves, moving mechanically and speaking with distorted voices. This haunting performance intertwines Ferrante’s narrative with texts by Toti Scialoja and Wisława Szymborska.

Dark Games in My Brilliant Friend, by Massimo Marino | Corriere di Bologna, October 18, 2017

Two girls, two friends. Two dolls thrown into a dark basement as a challenge. Dolls that vanish, abducted by darkness—or perhaps by an ogre—and then seem to come to life with verses from fairy tales and poets like Frank Baum, Toti Scialoja, and Wisława Szymborska. No Embarrassing Questions from Them, playing tonight and tomorrow at Teatro delle Passioni in Modena, draws inspiration from My Brilliant Friend, the first volume of Elena Ferrante’s successful tetralogy. Chiara Lagani and Fiorenza Menni present the play at the Vie Festival, directed by Luigi De Angelis. It’s a collaboration between Fanny & Alexander and Ateliersi. For Fanny & Alexander, themes of childhood play and its wonder, constantly under threat, return. So does collaboration between experimental theater companies that emerged in the 1990s.

“Our passion for Elena Ferrante’s saga began with Chiara Lagani,” explains De Angelis. “Gradually, it spread to all of us, as it has with many readers. Perhaps it’s because of the toxic relationship between the two friends, growing up in a Naples suburb, whose intertwined lives span from childhood to adulthood.”

De Angelis continues, “Elena and Lila, the novels’ protagonists, are contained within each other. They communicate even in absence, as though each one’s body and emotions are guided by the other’s.”

To portray this dependence, the company—always fascinated by themes of heteronomy—developed a unique physical grammar: “We drew on the choreographic styles of Trisha Brown and Pina Bausch to express a kaleidoscopic interdependence. The play is divided into a white part and a black part, representing two interconnected psychological states.” This performance is the first in a trilogy that will ultimately form a single theatrical work based on the novel.

Stories of Friends and Dolls, by Gianluca Poggi | Gazzetta, October 19, 2017

No Embarrassing Questions from Them takes the stage tonight at Teatro delle Passioni, following the trail of Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. Chiara Lagani and Fiorenza Menni perform.

Why start with Ferrante?
Chiara Lagani (CL): Before starting My Brilliant Friend, I didn’t know the author. Despite my resistance to mainstream phenomena, once I picked up the book, I was captivated by “Ferrante fever.” Rereading it with Fiorenza, our 20-year friendship intertwined with the story, and the project took shape.

How did you approach the play from a dramaturgical and acting perspective?
CL: Ferrante’s concept of “smarginatura”—a state where boundaries lose their solidity—resonated with our decade-long exploration of heteronomy. The actor is swept by a wave, a third voice that dissolves the material boundaries between two bodies, merging and confusing energies.
Fiorenza Menni (FM): This theatrical approach explores the freedom that arises from the meeting of text and body. We aim to deliver the book’s power and our interpretation with immediacy and rhythm.

What is the “embarrassing question”?
FM: For me, it’s Chiara’s dramaturgical question to the author, a delicate and intimate inquiry into Ferrante’s text. It also evokes Szymborska’s poetry, which inspired our title.
CL: The question is multifaceted and reflected through the dolls, evoking the novel’s universe. It challenges modesty and identity within a turbulent friendship. There’s embarrassment in adapting Ferrante’s words for the stage and blending them with personal dimensions. The dolls, as lifeless objects, have no modesty or embarrassment, yet this tension remains, unsettling and driving our project.

No Embarrassing Questions from Them – Directed by Luigi De Angelis, by Nicola Arrigoni | Sipario, December 21, 2017

No Embarrassing Questions from Them is the first step in Fanny & Alexander’s journey through Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. Chiara Lagani, Luigi De Angelis, and Fiorenza Menni explore Ferrante’s resonant, disquieting prose through movement, voice, music, and dance. In the novel’s first volume, two girls throw their dolls into a basement. The dolls disappear, and convinced that the ogre Don Achille has taken them, they bravely confront him.

This performance isn’t just storytelling; it embodies Ferrante’s narrative. Lagani and Menni, first dressed in white and later in black, reflect Elena and Lila’s complex relationship. Their mirror-like presence on a minimal stage evokes a photographic studio—or the dark basement itself.

De Angelis creates a soundscape and choreography that transposes Ferrante’s language into powerful physical form. The actors’ movements, gestures, and voices intertwine, transforming words into rhythm and sound. This meticulous construction reveals that true literature isn’t just about stories but also form, sound, and language’s deep impact.

Lagani and Menni forge a coercive bond through words, gesture, and rhythm. The performance immerses the audience in Ferrante’s narrative, compelling them to confront unsettling truths beneath the surface—a small masterpiece in anticipation of its next chapte

Two Friends Bring Ferrante to the Stage

By Sarah Perruccio | Leggendaria, March 2018

The success of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet has long transcended national borders and, recently, even the printed page. Many adaptations have emerged for theater, radio, and television. In the UK, the stories of Lila and Lenù were broadcast in a radio adaptation by acclaimed playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker on BBC Radio 4 in August 2017. Just a few months ago, the characters graced London stages in another theatrical version by noted author April De Angelis, directed by Melly Still. Simultaneously, the Italy-US co-produced TV series directed by Saverio Costanzo, the first television adaptation of Ferrante’s work, is in progress. In an interview with Repubblica, Ferrante expressed curiosity, rather than jealousy, about adaptations of her works: “Screenwriters and directors are unique readers who leave a trace of their interpretation and showcase their creative goals.”

We discussed this process of reading and reinvention with Chiara Lagani and Fiorenza Menni, the performers behind a remarkable adaptation titled No Embarrassing Questions from Their Side. Directed by Luigi De Angelis, with dramaturgy by Lagani, this production was recently awarded the Riccione Prize for “Dramaturgical Innovation.” The performance features only two actresses who, in the first part, wear white and recite Ferrante’s words. In the second, transformed into dolls with painted faces and black costumes, they explore themes from Ferrante’s work using inspirations from other authors.

You, Chiara, read My Brilliant Friend first and then suggested it to Fiorenza. How did you approach reading the novel together?
Chiara: We respected each other’s space while reading. I thought of Fiorenza when I first read it, but other projects were occupying us then. After finishing the entire series a year later, the idea had persisted, so I finally messaged her.
Fiorenza: She asked me, “Have you read My Brilliant Friend?” Ironically, my partner had just finished reading it while caring for my father. I replied, “Andrea read it, but do I seem like someone who would read My Brilliant Friend?” Even though Andrea loved it.

And then?
Fiorenza: I read it as the book demands—you can’t put it down. It was a dual-layered experience, intense with love, pain, and anger. I kept thinking about Chiara’s perspective, how she saw me in this or that passage. It became a personal and layered reading journey.

Why did you decide not to define the characters explicitly and to blend multiple voices in the performance?
Chiara: Initially, it was a necessity since we couldn’t manipulate the text. In theater, we need to translate literary elements. Lila doesn’t exist on her own but as Elena’s projection. This dual nature is embedded in the text: Elena continually imagines Lila, perhaps distorting her. We portray this mutual influence, with each character’s actions reflecting the other.

Identifying the characters is challenging for the audience, but tempting.
Chiara: The text is designed to sow doubt and gradually draw you into identifying with the characters. In the second half, the identities become clearer, focusing on dialogue without reducing them to typical stage roles. We transition from narrative distance to immersive storytelling, mirroring the novel’s progression.