La Scortecata
Event
Emma Dante's stage creations has always been pervious to the spell of fable. In “La Scortecata”, the Sicilian stage director takes possession of “The Two Old Women”, one of the 50 tales that are told over the course of five days from Giambattista Basile's collection, “The Tale of Tales” (1646), known as “Pentamerone” (by association with Boccaccio's “Decameron”). On an empty stage, two chairs, a door and a miniature castle are all that is needed for two actors to kindle a dream. They embody Carolina and Rusinella, the lonely sisters who are almost a hundred years old who, to deceive time, disguise themselves as the old women in the fable. A king falls in love with the voice of one of them, mistaking her for a young woman, and the price of illusion literally becomes a matter of skin: to put on and remove a character's skin. Emma Dante's rewriting of the tale of this fabulist, who provided a model that was later followed by the Brothers Grimms and Charles Perrault, preserves the truculence of the Neapolitan dialect and evokes fairground theatre and “commedia dell'arte”. Hilarious and cruel, “La Scortecata” emanates in filigree a melancholy that speaks to us of the passing of time, ageing and loneliness.
