Sylvie e Bruno

Loosely based on Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll, translated by Chiara Lagani for Einaudi EditoreFinalist for the 2021 UBU Awards for Best New Italian Play or Dramaturgical Writing

  • Concept: Chiara Lagani and Luigi De Angelis
  • Dramaturgy: Chiara Lagani Direction,
  • Set and Lighting: Luigi De Angelis Cast: Andrea Argentieri, Marco Cavalcoli, Chiara Lagani, Roberto Magnani, Elisa Pol
  • Music and Sound Design: Emanuele Wiltsch
  • Barberio Costumes: Chiara Lagani
  • Sound Supervision and Technical Coordination: Vincenzo Scorza
  • Organization: Marco Molduzzi, Maria Donnoli, Martina Barison
  • Communication and Promotion: Maria Donnoli, Francesca Volpato
  • Image: Igor Siwanowicz
  • Production: Ravenna Festival, E Production/Fanny & Alexander, in collaboration with Ravenna Teatro
  • Special Thanks: Anita Baliani, Paul Behnam, Brando Carella, Vittoria Casadio Lombini, Guido Farina, Anna Frantini, Leo Molduzzi, Rodolfo Sacchettini
  • “The Gardener’s Song” performed by: Emanuele Wiltsch Barberio
  • Photography: Enrico Fedrigoli

Year : 2021

Service : Set and lighting design

On the occasion of the release of Lewis Carroll’s third novel, Sylvie and Bruno, newly translated by Chiara Lagani (dramaturg of Fanny & Alexander) for Einaudi, the company presents a stage adaptation inspired by this fascinating tale. The book tells two parallel stories: a troubled love affair and a “magical” narrative featuring Sylvie, a young girl, and her tiny, ungrammatical brother, Bruno.

Sylvie and Bruno, which inspired James Joyce’s famous novel Finnegans Wake, operates through the visionary lens of dreams. It offers a captivating dimension that transcends ordinary perception and material confines, allowing for imaginative and dizzying experiences that reflect core issues of both individual and collective unconsciousness.

Imagine feeling deeply weary, on the brink of sleep, ready to be swept into a dream. This semi-awake state, where the body becomes heavy and the mind drifts, serves as the starting point for this performance. It evokes the transitional moment between wakefulness and dreams, where fleeting images and sounds take on a surreal consistency. The dream world emerges—a realm governed by its own rules, transforming daytime perceptions through the lens of our unconscious.

On stage, the actors embody the raw essence of this process. They guide the audience through an almost minimalist visual setting, which gradually transforms as voices and hyper-realistic sounds evoke dreamlike locations. These settings materialize like sonic holograms or spectral figures, breathing life into the intertwined stories.

A subtle “self”—represented by a witness-narrator—traverses both worlds, passed like a baton between actors. Some characters possess a “dual citizenship,” existing simultaneously in both dimensions. Magical figures Sylvie and Bruno take human form, blending into the morally complex world of adults.

These two worlds—dream and reality—each follow different logics. The enchanting Bruno and two quirky, borderline professors embody this duality, engaging in whimsical scientific discoveries and a philosophical form of “resistance.” In the magical realm, a recent coup has led to fantastical manipulations, while the real world grapples with a devastating fever, reminiscent of contemporary pandemics.

One world teeters on collapse, suddenly invigorated by the forces of beauty and imagination. The other, plagued by a metaphorical illness, endures through the transformative powers of love and art.

TOUR

  • June 16-19, 2021, Ravenna, Ravenna Festival
  • November 17-19, 2021, Ravenna, Fèsta – Stagione dei Teatri (Ravenna Teatro)
  • March 23-24, 2022, Bologna, Arena del Sole
  • July 13, 2022, Milan, Da vicino nessuno è normale
  • November 29, 2022, Lugano, LAC
  • March 21-26, 2023, Rome, Teatro India
  • October 20, 2023, Potenza, Città delle 100 Scale Festival – Il Piccolo Teatro

PRESS REVIEW

  • VALENTINA VALENTINI, FATA MORGANA
  • WEBMASSIMO MARINO, DOPPIOZERO
  • GIANNI MANZELLA, IL MANIFESTOMICHELE
  • PASCARELLA, GAGARINE MAGAZINE
  • RENZO FRANCABANDERA, PANEACQUACULTURE
  • FRANCESCA GIULIANI, L’INCERTEZZA CREATIVA
  • LUDOVICA CAMPIONE, IL PICKWICK
  • MADDALENA GIOVANNELLI, IL SOLE 24 ORE

Inverting the Order of Things by Valentina Valentini | Fata Morgana Web, June 20, 2021

The relationship between literature and theater, after years of tension where asserting the autonomy of performance over the dominance of the text was crucial, now stands in the New Millennium as a balance among expressive elements: space, actor, sound, light, verbal text, all integral to theatrical construction. In Sylvie and Bruno, Chiara Lagani’s authorship unfolds in multiple roles: she translated Carroll’s novel, performs on stage, and collaborated with Luigi De Angelis (direction, lighting) and the cohesive group of performers, including Andrea Argentieri, Roberto Magnani, and Elisa Pol. Fanny & Alexander’s theatrical practice often draws from literary sources such as Nabokov, Ferrante, Levi, and others.

Lagani’s dual role as dramaturg and translator reflects an organic approach, likening translation to staging a performance—both involve listening to the author’s voice, connecting story elements, and visualizing settings. This connection is particularly strong with Carroll, who developed his stories orally, similar to playwrights creating works in collaboration with actors.

The stage production adapts Sylvie and Bruno‘s dual storyline—one about conflicted love and the other a magical tale featuring Sylvie and her brother Bruno. These worlds blur together, reflecting Carroll’s themes where the Victorian reality and symbolic dreamscape intertwine.

The performance space expands geometrically, with actors moving amidst minimal props (chairs/benches), voices, and sounds that conjure hyperrealistic environments. Fanny & Alexander’s distinctive “remote acting” technique conveys Carroll’s text through an almost musical composition of voices and movements, creating a dynamic blend of narration, dialogue, and commentary.

Ultimately, the play suggests that reality is as elusive as dreams. As in Carroll’s tale, where a magical coup occurs and a mysterious fever rages (echoing our pandemic era), childhood becomes a regenerative force for adults. Bruno’s fragmented language mirrors Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, disrupting logic and order—just as the performance challenges conventional perspectives, urging adults to see the world through a child’s eyes.

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Mario Draghi in the Fairy Realm, by Massimo Marino | Doppiozero, June 25, 2021

Are you ready to enter the land of enchantment? A low sound, a plucked note, a chord, a violin, then a thin flute. Suspense. Three actors and two actresses take possession with wide, mysterious gestures of a long, narrow white space, surrounded by objects resembling strange music stands. These objects light up with sharp, shifting colors—blue, green, yellow, red—like square eyes. Hieratic, suspended gestures; the suspension of everyday movements. The actors line up in front of the audience, exchanging the “rules to see a fairy”: “It has to be an extremely hot afternoon… too hot to do anything else… You need to be a bit sleepy, but not so much that you can’t keep your eyes open… and you have to feel, how should I say it? Enchanted… eerie, as the English say… But most importantly, the final rule: crickets must not be chirping… (Forest sounds: birds, streams, leaves… There are crickets too.) No crickets, I said!” (The crickets stop.)

Welcome to the world of Sylvie & Bruno, the last novel by Reverend Lewis Carroll, a dizzying book published in 1889, years after Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It has now been retranslated for Einaudi by Chiara Lagani, a joyful, somewhat pataphysical priestess of the fantastic realm (she also translated Baum’s Oz books for Einaudi). She adapted it for the stage at the Ravenna Festival with her theater company, Fanny & Alexander—a vessel of voyagers devoted to the kingdom of Fantasy and Surreality.

The recorded voices of the two child protagonists, Sylvie and Bruno, soon emerge. Sylvie is a wise young girl, while Bruno is a curious, ungrammatical little Pinocchio who always sees the emperor as he is—naked. They inhabit the Outer World, to which we are transported by the initial magic of the actors. But these are true enchanters—not merely shamans—because they do not just leave us stranded in that perfect but anxiety-inducing world, where pure desires forever elude our grasp, replaced by other desires. Instead, these magicians keep transporting us from that enchanted realm—a palace surrounded by a fairy forest—to other places. We end up in a train car, like in an Agatha Christie mystery (she was born a year later, in 1890). We are plunged into a grotesque palace conspiracy (again in the Outer World), featuring a princeling with a name that sounds like a gurgle or vocal growl: Uggug. His father, a Sub-Governor, aspires to become Père Ubu (the first version of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi dates to 1888-1889), while his wife aims to transform into a Grand-Guignol Lady Macbeth. Meanwhile, the voices of the people rise, buzzing or roaring slogans like “More bread, fewer taxes” or even “More taxes, less bread…” We return to the train, witness a very Victorian courtship, land on a station platform, and then find ourselves at a country estate—Reality. This reality is periodically disrupted by Sylvie and Bruno, the tricksters.

Suddenly, bears and Vikings appear, reminiscent of those Trump incited to storm the U.S. Capitol. Amid scents, colors, and fairy magic, we return to the estate. A stiff military fiancé arrives, sinking the hopes of another protagonist who loves Lady Muriel (often transformed into Sylvia). The dream resumes—perhaps through a professor’s words, a narrator’s tale, or the sighting of a beggar—by someone promising to turn back the clock because time doesn’t exist, or can magically change. Or it is relative, psychic, internal—Proust was still a teenager then, and Einstein’s theory of special relativity was 15 years away.

Sylvie & Bruno, with its linguistic inventions that even inspired Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, constantly blurs reality and dreams (Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899). Narrative is the driving force behind these metamorphoses, acrobatically creating worlds, spaces, and times—an endless kingdom of desire where fulfillment is always just out of reach.

In her Einaudi edition, Chiara Lagani identifies 45 transitions between realms, facilitated by clear “bridges.” Yet many more subtle shifts exist, often contained in a few words or gestures. This mapping becomes the foundation for the theatrical performance, brought to life by the skilled actors. They create an enchanting territory, full of electric shocks that repeatedly pull us back to our world.

The cast includes Chiara Lagani herself, both light and profound; Marco Cavalcoli, who has returned to the company and, as always, embodies characters like a catalog of gestures and voices; Andrea Argentieri, who previously portrayed a perfect clone of Primo Levi; Elisa Pol, vibrant and “on loan” from Nerval Teatro; and the engaging Roberto Magnani, also on loan from Teatro delle Albe. They are supported by a magically changing, fairy-tale-like soundscape composed by Emanuele Wiltsch Barberio, with sound direction by Marco Oliverio. Luigi De Angelis handles direction, set design, and surprising lighting effects, evoking psychedelic shifts with “Lupo” lights that resemble lecterns when off.

Fanny & Alexander’s Sylvie & Bruno offers more than a delightful performance. It’s a mirror reflecting us in dreams, desires, and attempts to survive the real world’s harshness. It tells us we can transform—be as fluid as water, dance among the waves. Theater becomes an alchemical journey, a space-time probe with walls made of forest and the sound of streams. It’s filled with fairies, station masters, political bogeymen, professors, and gatekeepers—crickets chirping so loudly we can’t see the fairies, followed by silent moments when they finally appear, only to drift back into the parallel world beneath.

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Fanny & Alexander, A Journey into Wonderland, by Gianni Manzella | il manifesto, June 26, 2021

At the theater. As part of the Ravenna Festival, the new show titled “Sylvie and Bruno” was presented.

How wonderful it is to return to a theater, people were saying, but it’s equally thrilling to revisit beloved spaces like the black-walled rooms of Comandini in Cesena. These spaces reopen with Romeo Castellucci’s enigmatic, unsettling visual and sound performance, The Third Reich, focused on the totalitarian power of words. Those familiar with Castellucci’s work will recognize the thread connecting his distant Hamlet to the shocking Genesis from decades ago. Or consider the 19th-century Artificerie Almagià in Ravenna, a perfect example of industrial archaeology reclaimed for culture. Here, Fanny & Alexander—within the 2021 Ravenna Festival program—presented their dreamlike Sylvie and Bruno.For a moment, one might wish to forget the bleak story of the appointment of Emilia Romagna Teatro’s new director and its disheartening outcome, as well as the dark clouds already gathering over Teatro di Roma. The show, freely adapted by Chiara Lagani (playwright and performer) and Luigi De Angelis (director) from Lewis Carroll’s last novel, starts on a similarly hot afternoon as Alice’s descent into Wonderland. Here too, there’s a child, a brother and sister as the title Sylvie and Bruno suggests, and a Wonderland that hints at both Reverend Dodgson’s Victorian England and a much more contemporary time. There are references to an assault on the Capitol led by a horned “fake Viking” and to an economic crisis where it’s time not to take money from citizens but to give it to them.Children naturally share a special relationship with theater, as expected. It lies in the joy of hearing a story whose ending is already known. As adults, they’ll learn this story is called life. “Let’s pretend,” says the narrator. “Now I’ll tell you a story. Let’s pretend this square is a garden.” The bare space of the old sulfur warehouse comes alive without elaborate sets, needing only the shifting lights from surrounding projectors and a few white chairs that—like in childhood games—can transform into a train carriage.Five actors suffice (in addition to Lagani: Marco Cavalcoli, Andrea Argentieri, Roberto Magnani, and Elisa Pol). They effortlessly swap cloaks and coats hung in view offstage but never become conventional characters. Instead, they are metamorphic beings.The overlapping narrative layers blur into dreams or their metaphor: theatrical play. Even the reluctant narrator, drawn into the game, struggles to follow the adventures of Lady Muriel, her two suitors, palace intrigues, street revolts, and lessons about the best time to see fairies. “Where have we ended up?” they often wonder. The audience wonders too, happily lost in the experience.

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Behind (Inside) the Real. Four Cases, by Michele Pascarella | Gagarin Magazine, June 26, 2021

“Exercises in Imagination” could serve as a subtitle—paying homage to Master Rodari—for Fanny & Alexander’s new performance, premiered at Ravenna’s Artificerie Almagià during the 2021 Ravenna Festival.

Here, imagination is a term meant halfway between an escape into fantasy and a critical interrogation of reality. The starting point—or rather, the springboard for this latest leap into the unknown—is Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll, an author much admired and thoroughly explored by the cultured Ravenna-based company.

The initial tone/color sets the stage for the entire creation: a deep blue reminiscent of Yves Klein’s famous hue, suggesting a similar plunge into the void and a dreamlike yet realistic dimension of human experience.

Sylvie and Bruno appears to mark the full maturity of Luigi De Angelis (direction, set design, lighting). His sculptural approach, characterized by minimalism, creates a relationship between the significant and the uncanny, involving bodies (physical, sonic, luminous, material, verbal) and invites the audience, through a skillful montage of minimalist scenic elements, to compose images and imaginaries in their minds.

“Exercises in Imagination,” as mentioned: visible in the many games presented and performed by the actors (“let’s pretend this theater is now a square”). “Composition” also applies to the alternating narratives and performances, soliloquies and rhythmic choruses, vocal and semantic entities, conversational and melodic tones, silences, and the roar of street protests and strikes.

A few simple stools suggest different settings. The five figures on stage—including an extraordinary Elisa Pol, who sheds the excessive flamboyance of previous roles to reveal more magnetic and precise nuances—dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to this ineffable game. This offering, in turn, reaches the audience with a mix of trust and casual grace.

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Fanny & Alexander on Stage with Sylvie and Bruno, Lewis Carroll’s Last Novel, by Renzo Francabandera | Paneacquaculture, July 5, 2021

Sylvie and Bruno is the third and final novel—published in two parts in 1889 and 1893—by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Daresbury, January 27, 1832 – Guildford, January 14, 1898), better known to the public under the playful pen name derived from his real double name: “Lutwidge” (from the Latin Ludovicus) suggested Lewis, and the anglicized Carolus (Latin for Charles) became Carroll. Beyond his literary achievements, Dodgson was a mathematician, an early art photographer, a logician, and an Anglican priest in Victorian Britain—a life full of passions, including controversial ones, leading to accusations of pedophilia.

Today, Lewis Carroll remains one of literature’s most influential figures, especially for his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, works cherished by a diverse range of readers and writers. When Alice was published in 1856 under his classical pseudonym, it marked the beginning of an intriguing dual identity: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Lewis Carroll became almost two independent lives, akin to Jekyll and Hyde.

Perhaps this duality explains his interest in fantastical settings reminiscent of modern sci-fi (like today’s Black Mirror series). In late 19th-century England, during the industrial revolution and Marxist political ferment, the first version of Sylvie and Bruno was published in 1889, followed by Sylvie and Bruno Concluded in 1893. Derived from his earlier story, Bruno’s Revenge (1867), it became his final work for children. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the novel, though somewhat popular, was considered “bewildering and disjointed,” mixing fairy tale elements with moralistic Victorian themes.

Now, 132 years later, Chiara Lagani—co-founder of the theater company Fanny & Alexander—has produced a new Italian translation (recently released by Einaudi), giving the work renewed attention. Lagani’s translation inspired a stage adaptation that debuted in June at the Ravenna Festival, performed at the evocative Artificerie Almagià, a repurposed sulfur warehouse.

In this minimalist space, lit by small, moving devices, Carroll’s characters—like Lady Muriel, the dubious Vice-Governor, and the cunning Uggug—come to life. These characters might mirror those Dodgson observed in Victorian parlors or even aspects of his multifaceted self.

The performance doesn’t aim for realism: no costume changes distinguish the actors’ dual roles, and the set remains undefined. This approach plunges the audience into a deliberate estrangement—a hallmark of the company’s work. The actors, often guided by earpiece instructions, blur narrative boundaries, slipping between plotlines and personas.

Ultimately, the play explores chaos, dream vs. reality, and the fractured nature of contemporary society. Audiences oscillate between engagement and bewilderment, watching worlds built and destroyed on stage. It’s an anti-narrative experience that invites reflection on theater and literature’s complex relationship, mirroring the confusion of our post-truth world. A rich experience for an hour and a half of performance.

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In the “Psychedelic” World of Lewis Carroll, by Francesca Giuliani | L’incertezza creativa, December 22, 2021

Entering the Almagià in Ravenna, one is enveloped in a mysterious fog: in Sylvie and Bruno by Fanny & Alexander, the stage and audience share the same fantastic universe. On stage, Andrea Argentieri, Marco Cavalcoli, Chiara Lagani, Roberto Magnani, and Elisa Pol move on a white rectangle, entering and exiting, guided by Luigi De Angelis’s direction, immersed in a soundscape created by Emanuele Wiltsch Barberio. The narrative unfolds on two parallel levels, one realistic and one dreamlike; they never truly meet, except when certain words collide, switching the story from one to another or when the two children intrude into the narrator’s dreams, where he frequently falls asleep. The structure combines fairy-tale elements—characters transforming into animals, a forest, fairies, fate slinking about—with Victorian novel conventions, where the drama often pauses for the narrator’s commentary: on one side, Sylvie and Bruno in a fantastical world; on the other, Lady Muriel, loved by a doctor and her young friend but betrothed to a soldier.

Two aspects stand out immediately in this stage adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s eponymous text, recently translated by Chiara Lagani for Einaudi: the first is the empty space, which amplifies theater’s power to create infinite worlds through its fundamental dramaturgical tools—actors, sound, and light. The second is the writing, and thus the literature, which orchestrates words that can unlock the doors to marvelous realms.

[The use of parallel narrative planes is made possible because F&A’s theater incorporates not only literary formats but also cinematic techniques of editing and temporal shifts].

This is also the strength of Fanny & Alexander’s theater, which opens profound windows into the literary works it adapts, recharging the themes and characters with new life, connecting them to the present, making them resonate with today’s world. This was true for Storia di un’amicizia (2017-2019), based on Elena Ferrante’s L’amica Geniale, and for the large-scale project The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (2007-2009), inspired by L. Frank Baum’s novel, to name just two.

With Sylvie and Bruno, there is something even more: the work exists on a porous margin that connects many of the company’s pieces, bringing them to a point of dialogue, even with the origins of the company itself. This had already been explored in their early operatic direction of The Magic Flute: there, as here, two children play at creating imaginary worlds, knowing they are being watched. This is clear from the outset: the actors sit on white stools— the only props—lined up in front of the audience, directly addressing the spectators; they often stop to look at us and more frequently break the fourth wall by describing and commenting on their actions. In doing so, they take us into the very origin of the word theater, the place where one watches and is watched. Not coincidentally, the two openings lighting up the stage from the back appear as eyes that open and close, changing—through color alone—the visual and emotional perception of what is being observed.

A small jump, signaling the act of falling into Alice’s well to reach the other side, marks the beginning of the journey between the real and the imaginary. And just as in children’s play, each actor’s body passes through multiple characters, becoming a medium; they follow the same interpretive path that Lila/Fiorenza Menni and Elena/Chiara Lagani trace in their show Da parte loro nessuna domanda imbarazzante: there, as here, the heterodirection and cumulative repetition of certain gestures lead us into the vertigo of the marvelous, where worlds overlap, reality and fantasy coexist, and characters from different literary genres meet. In Sylvie and Bruno, Ubu meets Lady Macbeth, Sylvie and Bruno encounter the White Rabbit, and so on, eventually collapsing into today’s world, where hidden among the characters’ words, Mario Draghi suddenly appears.

If, as neuroscientists tell us, REM sleep is the most psychedelic phase of dreaming, where worlds collide, fantasy and reality overlap, and colors explode, it is precisely in this crevice of sleep that the actors lead us, layering multiple planes of the scenic narrative: the here and now of their stage presence, the narration leading to the tale, and the overlapping worlds that finally bring us back to reality: on one side, the Outside World, a people in revolt falling under a dictatorship, echoing the recent storming of Capitol Hill; on the other, a world from a 19th-century novel struck by the spread of a deadly fever. The short circuits between the works and characters, the reality of the story and the fantasy, interlock in certain words or fragments of sentences that overlap, reversing the order of the narrative as if someone were playing with a light switch, increasingly trapping the spectator in the concentric vortex of the scene. Then, they leave the audience there, on the edge of the void, probing the tangled mess.

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Let’s Pretend This Room Is a Theater, by Ludovica Campione | Il Pickwick.it, March 28, 2022

The last actor leaves the stage. The lights go out. You can hear the thoughts of the audience in the hall: “Is it over? Can I applaud?” The sensation is like waking from a deep sleep, unaware that you had fallen into it. This is what Luigi De Angelis and Chiara Lagani, alias Fanny & Alexander, have been doing for thirty years (they formed in Ravenna in 1992): they inhabit that interstice between dream and reality, like children playing “let’s pretend I’m the mom and you’re the daughter,” and in that space, they find theater. They draw the audience in, without trickery, with their shamanic rituals.

Once again, the framework is a literary text. Since the beginning of their theatrical journey, Fanny & Alexander have created dreamlike images and suggestions often freely inspired by great literature: David Foster Wallace, Elena Ferrante, L. Frank Baum, Tommaso Landolfi, Carlo Collodi, and Lewis Carroll, whose imagination they drew from for the work that first electrified the experimental scene of the 1990s, Ponti in core (1996). They return to Carroll again with Sylvie and Bruno, the third and least fortunate novel by the English author (which, however, inspired the famous Finnegans Wake by James Joyce), recently translated for Einaudi by Chiara Lagani, the visionary mind behind the dramaturgy of this production—and all other works by Fanny & Alexander. This is the first step in their special project 30F&A!, a year-long journey between Bologna and Ravenna celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the company.

Like the book, the play, directed by Luigi De Angelis, tells two stories: one “real,” a love affair between the charming Lady Muriel and the tormented Dr. Arthur Forester, set in the Victorian era in an unspecified city devastated by a strange contagious fever (sic!); and one “magical,” featuring two little siblings, Sylvie and Bruno, the umpteenth alter egos of Fanny and Alexander, caught in a revolution shaking the Outside World, of which their father is the Governor. But the boundary between the magical world and the real world, between dream and reality, is so thin that it removes from the audience, with veiled childish cruelty, the certainty of knowing what they are watching and when. It’s as if Lagani and De Angelis were saying: “Here, put on these child’s eyes and play with us.” And to play, you need very little: an empty space, a few flat lights that look like music stands, a couple of coats, five white stools, five actors, and plenty of imagination.

It’s dark. Only the cloud of smoke from a special effects machine is visible. Blue, sterile lights come on, and one by one, the five actors make their entrance: Andrea Argentieri, Chiara Lagani, Marco Cavalcoli, Elisa Pol, Roberto Magnani. They wear identical clothes: the men in suits with ties, the women in charming dresses that leave their backs exposed, only the colors are different. They immediately address us, the spectators, directly; they explain how to see the fairies, and the game is evident from the start: “In these past months at home, you must have sometimes imagined places, right? I mean, places different from the one you were in… For example, a forest…” This marks the beginning of the descent into the White Rabbit’s hole: the entrance to the Outside World, which then becomes a train to the countryside, then a castle garden, then a park picnic. We find ourselves first in a conspiracy: the Undersecretary wants to overthrow his brother and seize power, taking advantage of the city’s revolution (“More bread! Fewer taxes!” cries the crowd), accompanied by his wife, a squawking Lady Macbeth, and his pig-like son, Uggug (Carroll was a stutterer), who torments Sylvie and Bruno and ends up turning into a porcupine. But then Sylvie becomes Lady Muriel, traveling home, where her father and Arthur-Bruno, her neighboring lover, await. With her, in the train car (the five stools quickly become the train seats), is a cast of almost grotesque characters, including a zealous conductor, a man who snores, another who whistles incessantly, a cold woman, and a third man who constantly opens the window. In the blink of an eye, we’re back on the other side, where the Undersecretary and his wife, disguised as a Viking and a bear (but, of course, we can only imagine the costumes), search for their lost child, while Sylvie and Bruno, with the innocence of children, ask the strange dancing gardener to let them out to feed a beggar.

Throughout the performance, the actors (all excellent, particularly the ethereal Chiara Lagani) allow themselves to be inhabited by all kinds of strange characters, and they are always incredibly believable: the pact with the audience has worked. The lights, masterfully orchestrated by Luigi De Angelis, allow the story to come to life. The two levels of narration race forward in an imaginative chase, chasing each other and, in the end, overlapping: it will be Sylvie and Bruno, with their childlike voices, who choose and invent the ending of the story between Muriel and Arthur.

They’ve come a long way since Ponti in core, these two ravennati enfants terribles; little remains of that macabre and morbid aesthetic of anatomical theater from their early works. Yet they’ve stayed true to the same discourse they began thirty years ago: theater can and must be the language of the present; a mirror in which we can look at ourselves without necessarily being told something about who we are. A game in which, if we dare to play, we can recognize ourselves.

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Reality and Dream: On Stage with Lewis Carroll, by Maddalena Giovannelli | Il Sole 24 Ore, July 17, 2022

The Romagna-based company Fanny & Alexander – which recently celebrated its thirtieth anniversary – has always ventured into the realm of literature, transforming novels into successful stage adaptations. Their theatrical repertoire includes works by Nabokov and David Foster Wallace (with a memorable marathon lasting over twelve hours on Infinite Jest), but also contemporary authors like Elena Ferrante and Nadia Terranova (the theatrical version of Addio fantasmi just debuted in Ravenna). Founder Chiara Lagani, however, has a special relationship with authorial fairy-tale literature: in 2017, she curated for Einaudi The Oz Books by Frank Baum, and now she has published a new translation of Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll for the same publisher. This 1889 novel, which was beloved by Joyce, has always been somewhat neglected by the public and the publishing world.

Interestingly, the previous Italian translation was done by critic Franco Cordelli, a figure as connected to the theater as Lagani herself. In fact, anyone who ventures into Carroll’s imaginative writing will quickly understand why the text works so well when viewed through the lens of theater: there’s a sly narrator who sets the stage, and two intertwining planes (one realistic and the other fantastical), blending reality and fiction as theater often does. In 2021, Sylvie and Bruno became a performance, with an adaptation by Lagani herself (who also performs in the show) and a sharp direction by Luigi De Angelis.

The perceptual instability of dreams – which Carroll seems to grasp with surprising, almost pre-Freudian precision – becomes a sophisticated stage game of multiplying planes, challenging the audience to let go, just as one does when the head grows heavy and the images begin to dissolve. A stellar and cohesive team of actors completes the experience: the company’s key performers (Marco Cavalcoli, Andrea Argentieri) are joined by Roberto Magnani and Elisa Pol, adapting seamlessly to the fairy-tale and subtly unsettling tones of the author of Alice.

This performance deserves a long tour, to spark conversations about dreams among theater and literature enthusiasts, but (like many productions of these troubled seasons) it has had very few performances. The presence in Milan (on July 13, a one-time show) was thanks to Olinda and the festival Da vicino nessuno è normale, an attentive collector of new works that has been animating the spaces of the former Paolo Pini psychiatric hospital for years. The venue, we are sure, would have seemed ideal to Lewis Carroll.