by Fanny & Alexander and Federica Fracassi
freely inspired by the writings of Ágota Kristóf

• with Federica Fracassi
• direction, set and lighting design by Luigi Noah De Angelis
• sound design by Damiano Meacci
• dramaturgy by Chiara Lagani
• organization and promotion by Marco Molduzzi
• administration by Stefano Toma
• produced by E-Production, Piccolo Teatro di Milano / Teatro d’Europa, Teatro Stabile di Bolzano
• in collaboration with Romaeuropa Festival, AMAT, and the Municipality of San Benedetto del Tronto

Year : 2025

A woman sits at her worktable in a Swiss watch factory. She is Ágota Kristóf. The factory is perfect for writing poetry—one can think of other things. The machines tick with a regular rhythm that marks the verses. In her drawer, Ágota keeps a sheet of paper and a pencil. When a thought takes form, she jots it down. The woman doesn’t know the local language, yet she writes and thinks in this unknown tongue, which feels like an enemy to her.

In the factory, it’s hard to speak at all—the machines are too loud. You can only talk in the toilets, smoking a cigarette as fast as you can.

The woman tells her story—a story of exile, uprooting, and atrocity. She wants to say something about herself, but to do so, she must invent masks. And so, unexpectedly, we find ourselves inside her novels. The woman becomes Lucas, Claus, Sandor, Line… but only for a moment. We drift into a dream, or to the heart of a dense childhood memory. Only in this way can the writer tell us what she knows. But we always return to that room, to the ticking clocks and the sound of the present. The language she speaks to us in was not her choice. It was imposed on her by chance, by circumstance. She will do the best she can. It is a challenge. The challenge of an illiterate.

On stage, Federica Fracassi embodies Ágota Kristóf: same glasses, same hair, same clothes, same physical presence. Before we even see her at her worktable, her gaze—via projection—explores the components of a watch during its assembly. Her story begins in the confined space of this meticulous, regulated, obsessive, and maniacal work. When we finally see her, behind a sheer scrim, suspended in the darkness like in a cave, working at her table and merging with the projection, we see she wears a magnifying lens/monocle over her right eye. It enlarges the work she performs with tweezers and other tools. This lens is connected to a microcamera that broadcasts her gaze in real time, projecting it onto the scrim or onto a small LED panel above her—serving a dual function depending on its angle: to light her worktable with monochrome colors or to further reflect her face, lost in memory and storytelling, or guiding us into other times and places—the realms of her imaginative and creative universe. The stage becomes a mirror of the emotional, psychic, and material layering from which her narrative and thought emerge, immersing us in the labyrinthine complexity of her inner mechanisms.

The sound design explores the possibility of expanding and immersively inhabiting the sonic interstice between two obsessive ticks, emphasizing the redundancy of the ticking and the idea of an exasperatedly magnified mechanism, which—through multiplication, deformation, and stretching—becomes the generative, cardiological engine of the story and an anamorphic vector for other worlds.

Premiere: Teatro Vascello, Rome
Saturday, October 18, 2025, at 9:00 PM
Sunday, October 19, 2025, at 5:00 PM