«This story, the radio play, the songs, the Ballad Opera that we present here, everything is born from a death. From a harvested seed that must go beyond that death to generate. It is a story of friendship, a male friendship, a somewhat old-fashioned genre, recently brought with poetic effectiveness to the screen by Francesco Sossai in The cities of the plain. We invited Pierpaolo Capovilla to take a seat in that pool precisely to celebrate the value of this type of friendship and with it a series of disused things: rock'n'roll, the epic of failure, love for bad masters, mutiny, sabotage, rebellion, thunderous solitude, felinity, anarchism. The ghosts of a life in the form of songs crowd around that pool.”
Thus Vinicio Capossela introduces And Death will have no dominionthe ballad opera as he defines it born from radio drama Under the milk forest (we wrote about it at this link), which in turn was born around the poem for voices Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas. The show will debut on 3 and 4 October at the Teatro Olimpico in Rome, for Romaeuropa Festival. Dates will follow in theaters throughout Italy, until December.
The work is set in Llareggub, a village by the sea invented by Thomas, and is freely inspired by the life of the radio DJ Renato Striglia, who died in 2020, who for years worked on an Italian version of Under Milk Wood without being able to complete it. The tub to which Capossela refers is present on the scene and in there Capovilla is «laying as if in Noah's ark» and «is visited by the presence of the community of experience, incarnation at the same time of Renato, of Dylan Thomas and of Captain Gatto, the blind sailor who is the central protagonist of the story created by the pen of the Welsh poet».
«This» explains Capossela «is a work on innocence, on the lost Eden, on community. Thomas had imagined calling workThe Town That Was Mad…a village collectively declared crazy because everyone is simply the way they are. The society of order, law and power fences them off so as not to spread the contagion of this form of insanity. In that room around the tub, this humanity lives. Outside is the world we know.”
