Discorso Grigio

Production: Fanny & Alexander

Concept: Luigi De Angelis and Chiara LaganiDramaturgy: Chiara LaganiSound Design: The Mad StorkDirector: Luigi De Angelis

With: Marco CavalcoliAnnouncer: Chiara Lagani

Recordings: Marco ParolloCostume: Tagiuri AbbigliamentoProps: Simonetta VenturiniMask: Nicola Fagnani

Promotion and Press Office: Marco Molduzzi and Filomena VolpeLogistics: Fabio SbaragliaAdministration: Marco Cavalcoli and Debora Pazienza

“According to the official news agency, the President will address the Nation. This is not the first time in history that a President speaks to a country. So? The President will speak. What’s strange about that? What will happen? Those who recognize his voice will understand.”

The third chapter of Fanny & Alexander’s long-term theatrical project on speeches to a community, Discorso Grigio (Grey Speech) follows the radio drama Alla Nazione, aired on Rai Radio 3 on November 26, 2011. This performance explores the forms and rhetoric of political addresses. Playing with political oratory’s clichés and showcasing the power of language within a complex and intentionally surprising dramaturgy, Marco Cavalcoli—renowned for his portrayal of the ventriloquist Wizard of Oz—embodies a mysterious President. He delivers an important inaugural speech to the Nation, navigating the echoes of an indelible historical memory.

In March 2012, Discorso Alla Nazione, a study for Discorso Grigio, premiered.

The broader Discorsi project includes six monologue-performances over the next three years. Alongside Marco Cavalcoli, it features actresses Chiara Lagani, Francesca Mazza, Sonia Bergamasco, and actors Lorenzo Gleijeses and Fabrizio Gifuni.

Year : 2012

Service : Soundtrack (with the nickname THE MAD STORK)

Fanny & Alexander. A Conversation on Discorso Grigio by Michele Dantini, doppiozero.com, July 16, 2012

Michele Dantini: Straight to the point. Discorso alla nazione strikes me because of its change in archives and repertoire. No more paradigmatic literary texts but a different textuality: that of political discourse. It’s a drastic and driven shift in interests (I can imagine) perhaps due to a pressing need. To confront language at its miserable level, of extreme servitude or distortion: where enunciation no longer has intimacy with anything integral or living, but produces opacity, dullness, boredom through relentless repetition. It’s diversion, a Mask. I remember Silvio B.’s press conference at Cannes in early November 2011. We were close to financial collapse, but the man said: Italy is rich, restaurant halls are full, as are flights. Perhaps we have encountered, especially in Italy, what Conrad defined as the “horror.” We will remember an entire era as ruled by negligence, greed, and vanity. On the contrary, now that we hope that era is behind us, a fierce desire arises: to prevent its return, to produce anamnesis, to explore the conditions of adherence to language, the polish of language, the genius of language understood as “common”: perhaps the first, the original… And preliminarily: to know once and for all and pierce the Mask. Thus arises Fanny & Alexander’s exploration of political discourse, the “ethnography” of political discourse?

Chiara Lagani: That’s true, this work raised entirely new questions for us. It is the first time, in fact, that we directly engage with a theme linked to what is commonly called “current events”; and it’s also the first time we start not from an archetypal core, which usually draws its tentacles from a myth or a literary work as you say, but from a knot that, before being political (although politics is its domain), I would define as cultural, linguistic. The text of Alla nazione (the radio play) first, then Discorso alla nazione, and finally Discorso grigio (this is the stratigraphy of the project) is entirely based on materials taken from public speeches of politicians, and in most cases, these are television appearances, even off-air moments, or official speeches always broadcast through the media, which is now happening massively. This is material, as you say, often opaque, sometimes brutal, heavy, often intentionally played in a sort of intermediate space between official rhetoric and familiar apostrophe. However, the most striking thing is the sense of emptiness evoked by the repetition of formulas, stylistic devices, phrases that stack on top of one another, often triggering a sense of disorienting apnea, almost toxic to the listener, which gradually leads to the necessary distraction from that dull, tiresome knot, as you rightly define it. When we started composing the text, this operation was a real gamble for us. The idea was to have an actor, Marco Cavalcoli, pass through a thousand voices from the world of contemporary politics, so that by entering his body, they would emerge one by one. We wanted to create a text starting from fragments of real speeches, not so much to create a blob, but a real discourse, imaginary yet coherent. Imaginary because this discourse, though composed of real fragments, was never actually spoken in reality, coherent precisely because it absolutely had to have the structure of a complete discourse, in all its parts. And it was not obvious we would succeed. But surprisingly, the composition was simpler than expected. Not so much in the process: hours and hours of listening to even toxic materials, sometimes painful because the accumulation of all the atrocities we’ve been made to hear in the past twenty years is truly oppressive. Rather in the result: the phrases of Berlusconi-era politicians, for instance, clumped together despite the color and differing content like a puzzle gradually forming a sort of arcane and mysterious figure, perhaps exactly the Mask you define. The Mask, in addition to being a kind of omnipresent stone guest in the background, on which the track of the discourse was composed, in its own way, like a Medusa’s head, froze the audience in an eerie special reflection. It’s as if beyond the rhetorical polish, the common denominator of a language full of repetitions and clichés (political-speak), the deep cultural data, the linguistic abyss into which this stream of gray words sinks us, is now part of us, has permeated us so deeply that in a subtle, marrow-like way, it has taken root in an important part of our imagination. And in this sense, perhaps we can still produce an anamnesis, but is it really possible to claim or even hope to be truly and entirely beyond that era? Is it truly possible to cleanse ourselves without acknowledging that all of this is now part of us?
I don’t even know if I would define this work as a drastic change in orientation or interest for Fanny & Alexander: this discourse is part of a project dedicated to the relationship between the individual and the community, expressed through certain forms of public discourse. The original idea, the first seed, dates back to a special moment in the production of T.E.L., our show dedicated to Thomas Edward Lawrence (2011), which also ended with a political discourse (utopian and desperate) and perhaps even before, almost unconsciously, during the time of Him (2007), part of the Oz project. In Him, Cavalcoli was also traversed and “spoken” by the film score of Fleming’s movie, and his all-consuming, voracious dubbing had the ambiguous and terrifying face of Cattelan’s work, the kneeling Hitler. Looking closely, I believe, in the trajectory of an artist, even the most distant things are connected, through direct or invisible ways, because works are always just the tips of a consistent iceberg, submerged in the recesses of a lifetime of obsessions and evolving thoughts.

MD: Perhaps we could even go so far as to say that Discorso alla nazione is a tragedy, albeit in a very particular sense, far removed from the tradition of psychological drama. It is the tragedy of language: it first pushes the audience to feel horror, then to reminisce on the verge of a purification of linguistic and experiential processes. The moment when the actor on stage, the President, finally grants silence, does it not perhaps equate to catharsis? From the schizoid storytelling driven by the compulsion to dominate to silence. Marco is very good at “holding” silence: for a long time. Silence. Even the body, in the circumstance, seems to form controlled movements, no longer driven by split actions. The “action” in the traditional sense doesn’t exist: but a formidable vicissitude settles within the word. This, at least it seems to me, is the recent dramaturgical perspective…

CL: This question gives me the opportunity to reflect on the special space that the linguistic texture of the discourse creates in the performance. It’s very nice that you define this work as a tragedy, albeit in a particular sense. I think that, especially in its final form, which you haven’t yet seen, Discorso grigio is exactly like that. Or rather: it’s almost a tragedy, because it approaches catharsis, without really achieving it perhaps. It’s certain that language shapes the space of drama, and also the space of narration. In the latest version of the work, there is a whole section where new characters appear (such as the ghost of Grillo) that pose new rhetorical problems, and it is precisely in the (de)generation of other linguistic colors that the narration is inscribed, as a second-level effect. And the narration has to do with the present, with what happens every day, with that “current” that makes us perceive everything as already passed before it happens. It’s as if saying that the story of the performance (clinging to History) can only develop within a precise enclosure, that of discourse, and that the degeneration of a particular type of language is like the changing breath of a living (and perhaps dying) animal whose evolution and metamorphosis somehow reflect, by narrating it, the events of the last twenty years (and even earlier) of our country.
The fundamental articulation of the rhetorical situations in the performance distinguishes between onstage situations and backstage situations. The performance begins in a backstage: the actor/politician rehearses his speech. The stage is the situation where the management of expressions is maximized, while the backstage is where, theoretically, control can be loosened. The onstage situation is, for example, a political rally, a television interview, or a speech at a congress, where the politician is in front of the public or under the cameras, and thus in the presence of the audience (in imagination, the audience of a square or on television, in reality, we the spectators); the backstage situation is well exemplified by the politician, behind the scenes and hidden from the public, waiting for the start of the TV show or rally, letting himself go to rehearsals, warming up gestures, self-encouragement, maybe gaffes or inappropriate allusions about those who share the wait with him. In the performance, the basic situation that alternates moments of backstage with moments of public exposure, which are real emblematic moments of onstage moments, is complicated by two factors: the first is that the same individual, the actor playing the future president of the nation, is crossed by many voices, gestures, and statements of both present and past political figures that are well recognizable, in an increasingly uncontrollable crescendo; the second is that the backstage moment, as you define it in your question, is precisely the place where our great political speeches, including Berlusconi’s, have always been created. It’s like revealing the backstage before the final performance: as if by eliminating this uncertainty, removing the mask in a public way, the story of the political performance has no more secrets.

PAST DATES

5/6 July 2012 | Milan, Teatro La Cucina, Da vicino nessuno è normale
7 September 2012 | Segni (RM), Capannone della Castanicoltura, Contemporanea2012/Fèsta
13 September 2012 | Forlì, Ex Filanda, Crisalide XIX
21 September 2012 | Terni, Teatro Secci, Festival Internazionale della Creazione Contemporanea
21 October 2012 | Agliana (PT), Il Moderno, Intrusor
26/27/28 October 2012 | Rome, Angelo Mai
1 November 2012 | Castrovillari (CS), Teatro Sybaris, Primavera dei Teatri
25 January 2012 | Parma, Teatro al Parco, Teatro delle Briciole
13/14 February 2012 | Ravenna, Artificerie Almagià
14 March 2013 | Ortona (CH), Teatro Tosti, Respiri di scena
17 March 2013 | Montescudo (RN), Teatro Malaspina, Oltremisura 2013
28/29 May 2013 | Rome, Teatro Valle Occupato
14/15 June 2013 | Turin, Cavallerizza Reale, Festival delle Colline Torinesi
2 August 2013 | Polesine Parmense (PR), Festival Il Grande Fiume
22 January 2014 | Faenza, Teatro Masini
19-23 February 2014 | Milan, Teatro I
8 February 2014 | San Lazzaro di Savena (BO), ITC
21 June 2014 | Gibellina (TP), Orestiadi
11 December 2015 | Verona, Teatro Camploy
2/3 March 2017 | Bologna, Sì
15/16 September 2017 | Rome, La Pelanda, Short Theatre (new version)
28 April 2018 | Pescara, Spazio Matta (new version)

PRESS REVIEW

Maria Grazia Gregori, “Il discorso del presidente”
Anna Bandettini, “La retorica del discorso pubblico trasforma l’attore in un pupazzo”
Renzo Francabandera, “Discorso Grigio: il volto del potere secondo Fanny & Alexander”
Michele Dantini, “Fanny & Alexander. Una conversazione su Discorso Grigio”
Maria Grazia Gregori, “La grigia politica secondo Fanny & Alexander”
Laura Capasso, “Due monologhi sul potere”
Claudia Cannella, “Fanny & Alexander, doppia riflessione sul potere”
Sara Chiappori, “Il discorso del presidente. Trucchi e inganni della retorica politica”
Alessandro Fogli, “Politica, melma di parole indistinte”
Renato Palazzi, “Discorso double face”
Massimo Marino, “Il discorso grigio della politica”
Franco Cordelli, “Quando il teatro politico fa rimpiangere anche Crozza”

Il discorso del presidente, by Maria Grazia Gregori, L’Unità, 6 July 2012

Within the summer festival “Da vicino nessuno è normale,” an important event took place in Milan, performed in the theatre of the former Paolo Pini psychiatric hospital. The new, interesting project by the Ravenna-based group Fanny & Alexander, Discorso, created by Luigi De Angelis and Chiara Lagani, made its debut. This episodic project will feature six different performers, from Marco Cavalcoli to Chiara Lagani, from Lorenzo Gleijeses to Francesca Mazza, from Fabrizio Gifuni to Sonia Bergamasco. It’s an almost novelistic journey that will conclude in 2014, focused on language, particularly the discourse in all its forms: political, educational, religious, union-based, legal, military—exploring the power that is both fascinating and often resembles the mortuary sludge that envelops all things, built upon rhetorical phrases, one-directional communication, if not deceitful. A color for each aspect, from gray to red, will symbolically fill the almost empty stage at various points.

The first stage, Discorso Grigio, is about politics, the way it speaks, and its breakdowns that present themselves as “novelty,” but are just populism. A word that involves everything and everyone in a babel of sounds that seems meaningless. In this Discorso Grigio, where a dynamic Marco Cavalcoli takes center stage, everything is gray: the stage resembling a dark room, the outfit with a white shirt and tie worn by him, the main character, the President preparing for an important speech. The President resembles an actor preparing backstage for a physical and emotional rehearsal that seems crucial: bursts, broken movements, piercing sounds coming from nowhere, almost an abstract dance, while outside, waves of voices enter, immediately recognizable. Voices from our present and past, they constantly interrupt the preparation of this kind of modern-day Charlot. The President is a mask, in fact, The Mask.

Here, the President narrates his “entry into the field” and as he speaks, his voice changes—Berlusconi, but also Bossi, Bersani, La Russa, Casini, Bertinotti, Napolitano, Grillo in an impossible dialogue with Monti… and there’s the past returning with Berlinguer’s voice and more distantly Churchill. True words, from real speeches, for a disturbing scenario.

The actor is traversed by these voices, he is both the mask and the megaphone for all of them, “embodying” them all in a sonic and physical delirium: a foot microphone is enough. For this is the space of language that questions its own sense of belonging, its potential to be shared, lived. To become public, in other words, dangerously forming power, if it is merely a fascination, if it is not shared. In reality—what the actor shows us—the power is alone, reduced almost to aphasia, an illusionist in white gloves still able to capture the audience. But then a clown with large yellow rubber hands spins to support a falsely popular speech from a second life comedian where everything is fake, exaggerated. A world of puppets for a lone man with a large cardboard head stolen from some carnival, bearing a tired resemblance to Berlusconi… The actor suddenly removes the mask, falls silent, and stares at us. Darkness. But we return to the beginning, to that waiting for the important speech to come, made by a man who does not exist, does not exist: “I leave all my possessions to the State,” he says. Between fiction and reality, unsettling.

La retorica del discorso pubblico trasforma l’attore in un pupazzo, by Anna Bandettini, La Repubblica, 8 July 2012

The “President” is alone, behind a microphone, ready for his speech to the nation, to Italy. He speaks and we, the “audience,” recognize tones, emphasis, even voices from our political memory: Berlusconi, Bersani, Monti, Napolitano, Di Pietro… And words, words taken from newspapers, fragments of their propaganda: “Italy is the country I love,” “Stop the spiral of hatred”… It’s the rhetorical routine, autistic and repetitive, of politics we know from yesterday’s and today’s newscasts, but here it transcends the present to become a sonic nightmare, ready to start again. Discorso Grigio is the latest stage in a project by Chiara Lagani and Luigi De Angelis of Fanny & Alexander about the rhetorical forms of public discourse. The impression is extraordinary: actor Marco Cavalcoli does not parody, but creates a delicate work of gestural counterpoints (becoming progressively a puppet actor). His abundance of words ultimately reveals only a vacuum of meaning. Which is also ours.

Discorso grigio: il volto del potere secondo Fanny & Alexander, by Renzo Francabandera, klpteatro.it, 18 July 2012

Sometimes the sensations of time spent near a performance need space to settle and blend with the time outside the theater. Often, after writing a review, a few days later I realize that the initial excitement gives way to the lukewarm fading of the memory, while other times, the performance strengthens and solidifies its presence in the mind. Especially with works by Fanny & Alexander, I’ve been giving myself a pause to think about them, trying not to be swept away by the cold emotion of the moment. Because the works of the Ravenna group are always like a metal surface, sometimes polished, sometimes raw, but always with a cold tone, in a lighting environment that has changed very little over the years, a half-light that evokes the unconscious, leading the audience to go beyond the immediate and rework images and codes in the form of abstract expressionism, with a scenic gesture guided by external instincts, in heterodirection, a stimulus often originating outside the actor’s realm on stage.

Discorso Grigio, which debuted in Milan during the festival Da vicino nessuno è normale (which continues until 28 July) at Teatro LaCucina in Paolo Pini, is the latest result from Fanny & Alexander, but actually the first act of a project focused primarily on the vocal aspect, but also on semantics and the art of rhetoric. Born as a radio drama, after its debut in November on Radio3 in the cycle “Tutto esaurito” curated by Rodolfo Sacchettini, through the voice (and now also the body) of a convincing Marco Cavalcoli, it explores a reflection on public language.

As mentioned, this is the first part of a two-year exploration of discourse by Luigi De Angelis and Chiara Lagani, starting with the political discourse and moving on to pedagogical, religious, union-based, legal, and military discourses, with different actors bringing each spoken word to life. The first act was entrusted to Cavalcoli, while the following will feature Chiara Lagani, Lorenzo Gleijeses, Francesca Mazza, Fabrizio Gifuni, and Sonia Bergamasco.

Each speech will have a color. The political one is gray. Like the double-breasted suit of a deputy. It’s the speech of a new president (from the Party of Clean Love); the voice is a blend of the voices of our contemporary politicians, a blob of phrases, fragments, gestures, hands pointing, raspberries, kicks: a bestiary of blindness, where the performers hold each other up, all contributing to lead the caravan off-track.

Cavalcoli wears headphones, as if listening and repeating fragments, with an impressive ability to imitate and replicate. We don’t know what the actor is hearing, but the company’s recent experiments with heterodirection, with repeating gestures until their literal meaning is lost in favor of an allegorical one, make us imagine that what happens on stage is just part of a whole, a fraction that completes itself outside, in the direction booth, through the headphones, and, appropriately, in the audience’s mind.

We particularly care about this last part because we consider it essential for the maturity of the artwork itself, for its ability to become timeless. That’s why we loved the dramaturgy of West, supported by Francesca Mazza’s fragile, stumbling body, and less so the experiment TEL, presented last summer during the Roman Short Formats festival. In West, the outside-the-stage game was unclear; if it wasn’t communicated directly to the audience, the resonance in the context and symbolism was too convoluted to bring us back to the initial reference.

“La grigia politica secondo Fanny & Alexander” by Maria Grazia Gregori, MyWord.it, July 7, 2012

“Da vicino nessuno è normale,” a festival of new languages and surprising encounters organized by Olinda at the former psychiatric hospital Paolo Pini in Milan, has long been established as a high-quality event, a shining highlight in Milan’s otherwise almost insignificant summer season. Here, we saw the first episode of Fanny & Alexander’s new project, one of the most interesting realities in our experimental theater. Originally creators of figurative and performative conceptual theater, the members of the Ravenna-based group have for some time been engaging, or perhaps clashing, with the word, exploring it within narrative projects that revolve around characters with long histories and journeys.

The new project by Luigi De Angelis and Chiara Lagani, which will conclude in 2014, is dedicated to exploring discourse in six emblematic and “ritualistic” moments: from the political to the pedagogical, from the religious to the trade union, from the legal to the military. It will be interpreted by six different actors: Marco Cavalcoli, Chiara Lagani, Lorenzo Gleijeses, Francesca Mazza, Fabrizio Gifuni, and Sonia Bergamasco. The idea stems from a desire to engage with and confront the magnetic power of a way of being and relating to others, built on the rhetoric of clichés and one-way, often false communication. Each episode will have a symbolic color, from gray to red, which will affect not only the stage but also the actor’s presence.

The first stage, Discorso Grigio (Gray Speech), concerns politics, the way of speaking about politics, and its breaks, which, instead of being innovations, are mere populism. A word that encompasses everything and everyone in a Babel of sounds, seemingly without meaning. In this “Gray Speech,” starring the acrobatic and brilliant Marco Cavalcoli, everything is gray: the scene, which resembles a dark room; his attire, with a white shirt and tie; and the protagonist, the President, who is about to deliver, or wishes to deliver, an important speech. The President resembles an actor preparing backstage for a physical and emotional rehearsal, a task that seems important. There are jerky movements, piercing sounds coming from unknown sources, almost an abstract ballet, while voices from outside – immediately recognizable – interrupt the preparation. These voices come from our present and past: Berlusconi, Bossi, Bersani, La Russa, Casini, Bertinotti, Napolitano, Grillo in an impossible dialogue with Monti, as well as the distant echoes of Berlinguer and Churchill. Real words from real speeches, creating an unsettling atmosphere.

The actor, immersed in these voices, becomes the transmitter of these words, a body through which political language, jargon, and speech manifest in a performance that feels like a delirium of sounds, gestures, and words, amplified by a foot mic. This space of words interrogates their meaning, their potential for shared understanding, and their dangerous capacity to become a form of power when disconnected from genuine engagement. But the king is naked: the President is alone, almost aphasic with his white illusionist gloves, yet still able to captivate the audience. Then, a clown with oversized yellow rubber gloves appears, spinning wildly, supporting a fake popular speech from a secondary-life comic world, where everything seems real but is exaggerated and false. It’s a world of puppeteers, and a man with a large cardboard head resembling Berlusconi emerges.

The actor removes the mask and suddenly falls silent, staring at us. But we return to the beginning, to the anticipation of the important speech that will come from a man who claims to leave all his assets to the State. But that man does not exist—what is he? A vain illusion or a ghost from the past?

“Two Monologues on Power,” by Laura Capasso, Corriere della Sera, July 4, 2012

The national debut of the Ravenna-based company Fanny & Alexander at the “Da vicino nessuno è normale” festival introduces their new work, Discorso Grigio, on July 5 and 6. The show, conceived by Luigi De Angelis (director) and Chiara Lagani (dramaturgist), stars Marco Cavalcoli as a mysterious President preparing for a crucial speech to the nation. Alongside Cavalcoli, Chiara Lagani will also participate in West, the final performance of a project dedicated to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which the company has worked on for three years (only performing on July 4).

West begins with a simple, sparse set: a woman with long blonde braids and red shoes (Francesca Mazza, 2010 Ubu Award winner) sits at a small wooden table, trapped within the spell that Frank Baum created for Dorothy. The metaphorical strings controlling her are language and hidden persuasion—tools designed to suspend judgment and control decisions. Alone on stage, she follows a pattern of gestures and words dictated by voices offstage.

In contrast, Discorso Grigio opens a new project dedicated to speeches made to a community, with Chiara Lagani, Francesca Mazza, Sonia Bergamasco, Lorenzo Gleijeses, and Fabrizio Gifuni joining in the following years. In this first performance, Marco Cavalcoli portrays the President, who explores the techniques of political language and oratory. The show takes fragments from real political speeches and forms them into a coherent, albeit imaginary, discourse where the President becomes a mask that morphs into various political figures. In the chilling conclusion, the mask is removed, leaving the unsettling question, “Are we truly out of that era?”

“Fanny & Alexander: Double Reflection on Power,” by Claudia Cannella, Corriere della Sera, July 4, 2012

There is a common thread that unites West (tonight) and Discorso Grigio (tomorrow and the day after), two performances by Fanny & Alexander at the Ex Pini (via Ippocrate 45, 9:45 p.m., 10). It concerns the relationship between the individual and power, particularly focusing on the techniques of media manipulation. In West, Francesca Mazza (reincarnated as Dorothy) is alone on stage, recounting stories from her life while her gestures become increasingly frenetic, and her speech fragments. As Dorothy is harshly directed through an earpiece by two “hidden persuaders” (Chiara Lagani and Marco Cavalcoli), she becomes a subject in an experiment aimed at influencing choices and breaking free from manipulated thinking.

In Discorso Grigio, the same themes are present as Marco Cavalcoli, in a suit and tie, plays the President preparing for a national speech. By incorporating real political speeches, the performance creates an unsettling collage of voices, from Berlusconi to Kennedy, Churchill, and Grillo. Cavalcoli embodies a character-masked figure who, through mimicking political speech, explores the manipulative techniques of rhetoric.

“The President’s Speech: Tricks and Deceptions of Political Rhetoric,” by Sara Chiappori, La Repubblica, July 4, 2012

The Ravenna-based Fanny & Alexander company has accustomed us to powerful, imaginative theatrical sagas, where a single performance space is often too small to contain the complexity of their visions. This was true for their adaptation of Nabokov’s Ada, a twelve-episode exploration of the book’s baroque enigmas, and for their project on The Wizard of Oz, which spanned several performances, workshops, and exhibitions. Now, their latest challenge, Discorso Grigio, focuses on political rhetoric. This is only one chapter of a larger project that continues to explore the power dynamics and manipulative aspects of political language.

In this piece, Marco Cavalcoli plays a newly elected President preparing for a crucial national speech. The performance mixes real-life political speech fragments, creating a powerful portrayal of how political figures manipulate language and gesture. The question remains: in an era of heightened manipulation, do we truly retain our capacity for independent judgment? Fanny & Alexander avoid moralizing, offering the audience only keys to interpretation and not predetermined solutions. Through their performance, they investigate the alphabet of power and rhetoric, providing a profound, multifaceted look at the political language that governs our lives.

“Double Face Speech” by Renato Palazzi, Il Sole 24 Ore, September 23, 2012

Although it is just the first stage of a broader three-year project on public oratory, which will touch on various aspects of our social life and involve actors beyond the company, Discorso Grigio – the new show by Fanny & Alexander – is already a fully realized creation that offers sharp points of reflection. For the first time, the Ravenna-based group tackles a theme that is politically current: political rhetoric. They approach it in their characteristic way, conceptually, and almost subtly metaphysical.
Starting from a radio drama written for a cycle curated by Rodolfo Sacchettini, Luigi De Angelis and Chiara Lagani – the director and playwright respectively – they chose to explore power from a particular perspective, focusing on language as a tool for collective fascination. Their work addresses the media and the control of radio and television, but it is primarily focused on the word itself, the word as sound, as a pure communicative entity detached from specific meaning. Discorso Grigio depicts a hypothetical new President – whether from a party or a government doesn’t matter – giving a speech to the nation.
His address is captured from a whirlwind of perspectives: first in a preparatory trial, much like an emblematic theatrical training; then, in its realization, which degenerates into a hallucination, a visionary nightmare; and finally in the delirious dialogue between two opposites, Grillo and Monti, destined to culminate in a long, disarmed silence. But then everything restarts, in an unstoppable mechanism. Only on stage, in a grayish half-light, the excellent Marco Cavalcoli echoes the voices of various contemporary leaders – from Berlusconi to Bossi, to Di Pietro and Casini – while also adding recorded voices of Churchill, Berlinguer, and other historical politicians in a crazy temporal overlap. The actor, possessed by these voices, delivers an oration that combines fragments of speeches actually given by the invoked figures. These fragments surprisingly form a disjointed but unitary argument.
The ultimate meaning of this operation lies precisely in this disturbing interchangeability, this amorphous, gray indifference. Although the performance highlights the extraordinary metamorphic talent of the actor, the show is not a cabaret act, nor is it truly satirical: it is rather a chilling descent into the void that surrounds us, into the slippery lack of content that reflects and shapes us. Imitation is not a mere outward exercise, but becomes the metaphor for a historical condition that seems to rise from the darkness of our innards, something eloquently symbolized by the large papier-mâché head at the end, which entirely erases the character’s identity: it might seem like Berlusconi, but it could be any other puppet of authority reduced to appearance, to a hollow mask.

“Politics, Mud of Indistinct Words” by Alessandro Fogli, Corriere di Romagna, September 28, 2012

Fierce. Tragic. Indispensable. Such is Discorso Grigio, which Fanny & Alexander presented at Ex Filanda for the Crisalide Festival, the first of six episodes the Ravenna-based company has devised on different forms of speech.
The gray, a neutral, bland, heavy color born from the fusion of black and white while losing their clarity, corresponds perfectly to the nature of political speech, whose hyperbole, rhetoric, and clichés, no matter where they come from, inevitably flatten into shapeless mud.
In a dark, barren scene, Marco Cavalcoli, simply outstanding, plays a vague President preparing to address the nation. The preparation is frantic, athletic (or rather, theatrical), the gestures frantic; speech openings begin almost automatically, they stop, they repeat. Everything has already been said a thousand times, tried and retested, it’s only a matter of finding the right momentum. Then the actor-politician begins to be possessed, voices, gestures, and words that we have heard too many times on television or read in newspapers. The figures are those who have been haunting us for too long in the media: Berlusconi, naturally, but also Bersani, Di Pietro, Monti, Napolitano, La Russa, Grillo, Bertinotti, Bossi, and others, all in a frantic succession within the President. Yet, while the voices and gestures bear an uncanny resemblance, the intent is not parodic but rather documentary.
It is not the actor parodying; it is the character himself who has become a caricature. Clichés emerge, fragments of speeches, excerpts from debates, famous off-the-record moments, all absolutely from reality, and they form a chilling Frankenstein of oratory, a perfect emblem of the vacuity, and above all, the interchangeability of political proclamations. “Italy needs a new man,” “Tone down the rhetoric,” “Restart the economy,” “Morality,” “The importance of young people,” “Stop the spiral of hate,” “The country needs change.” Who said this? Everyone. All the politicians have said everything and its opposite, turning every speech, every word, every promise into gray, indistinct, empty, useless rhetoric.
The President seems overwhelmed by himself, the hyperkinetic counterpoint of voices and spasmodic gestures slowly transforms him, dehumanizes him, until, in the finale, his features resemble a puppet, a mask, that aged and funereal one of the great gaffe-prone leader, the graying embodiment of empty talk, the master of smoke and mirrors. And there’s still time for a painful jab, with a curtain closing that we won’t reveal. With Discorso Grigio – whose potential was already sensed in the radio drama Discorso alla Nazione aired on Rai Radio3 – the company of Chiara Lagani and Luigi De Angelis begins a new project of investigation into speech in various social contexts (military, religious, pedagogical, legal, and union), involving, besides Marco Cavalcoli, Lagani herself, Fabrizio Gifuni, Francesca Mazza, Sonia Bergamasco, and Lorenzo Gleijeses.

“The Gray Speech of Politics” by Massimo Marino, Doppiozero, September 19, 2012

He seems like a boxer warming up before entering the ring, an athlete getting ready, a star preparing for the cameras or the delirious audience of a concert. Frantic movements, compulsive words, bursts of adrenaline, gestures that seem driven by a mysterious external force. Fanny & Alexander, with Discorso Grigio (dramatization by Chiara Lagani, direction by Luigi de Angelis, sound by The Mad Stork), constructs what seems to be its most political show, continuing a reflection on the rhetoric of domination, on the currents that move the art of persuading more or less subtly.
The actor is the same as in Him, the amazing Marco Cavalcoli. His face here resembles that of Berlusconi one moment, and then that of Matteo Renzi the next. His voice shifts from Obama’s deep tones to the characteristic inflection of the former Prime Minister, from Bersani’s wandering metaphors to Renzi’s hissing, from the revolutionary lisp of late Togliatti rhetoric to the dullness of Monti, to Grillo’s excesses, crossing Bossi’s hoarse voice, La Russa’s barking, Prodi’s cadence, and Veltroni’s gestures, among others.
In Him (2007), the same actor reproduced, alone and like a ventriloquist, the soundtrack of The Wizard of Oz (1939) in a match with the film. Here, he’s like Crozza or Guzzanti, not leaving time for satire to settle into laughter before it becomes a shredder, a true tragedy of speech detached from things, worn like a verbal gesture, like an interchangeable mask, to win support. The political figures all become the same, slipping one into another in a unified “speech to the nation,” where the orator prepares like an athlete aiming to break a record for approval.
Between Him and Discorso Grigio, there’s West (2010), another stage in the long project dedicated by the Ravenna company to Frank Baum’s novel between 2007 and 2010. There, it was Francesca Mazza who was literally moved, directed externally in her words and actions. Here, the different political types seem to be animated by one single, consequential discourse, a long promise of action that remains only words, speeches, entertainment aimed at flattering, angering, polemicizing, moralizing, warming up, creating slogans that are increasingly emptied of meaning and practical effect.
The actor-political figure, announced by a female voice asking the audience to turn off their phones, is captured, with the help of a constant, effective sound track, in off-the-record moments, miraculous helicopter arrivals, the pounding of his heart before going on stage, and the emergence of gestural tics that seem to dominate him, dragging him, as if by a metaphysical wind driving him to impose himself. The backstage scenes alternate with the direct speeches in front of the microphones, with the performer always connected to another place via headphones. The journey through speech stolen from news broadcasts, interviews, and talk shows is filled with allusions to cleanliness, beauty, governance, optimism, cohesion, renewal – words reduced to empty labels, without substance, without demonstration, becoming apocalyptic in their meaninglessness, turning political action into a postmodern rally entrusted to the tricks devised by communication experts.
Thus, between Berlusconi, Bersani, Monti, and Grillo, Discorso Grigio is a portrait of our time, a fragmented series of televised moments constantly caught in the act of wanting to be remembered, of making promises that are soon forgotten, of being on a stage – both television and politics – where gestures give way to something superficial, to a hologram capable only of aiming for applause, and sometimes the cry of approval.
A funny but tragic show, where the politicians do not speak the language of the people but their own, ever more distant and increasingly untouchable. The whole show is set on an empty stage, designed by Paolo Cingolani, where the protagonist, dressed in a pale suit, is drawn into a mysterious and violent adventure, leading him to slowly peel away from reality. A mask (or maybe it’s just the reflection of a reflection) hangs above the stage. As the final whistle blows, silence descends. “He has finished,” says a voice. The gray speech has come to an end.