Screenshot from the film trailer ‘La stranezza’ (2022), directed by Roberto Andò. Screenplay by Roberto Andò, Ugo Chiti, Massimo Gaudioso. Leading characters : Toni Servillo, Ficarra e Picone, Luigi Lo Cascio.

Delightful is the lightness by which the film lets tragedy and comedy flow without a sharp order to point out this or that solution thread of that tangled skein which maybe seems the life, and which the adults get used to bear as heavy, and unavoidable.

The burden of removal is already a vague affection in a few years old child, buti t may sap one’s strength and prostrate because there’s something, at first, of unfair and then of wrong and not changeable, because that concerns the others, even better one’s own others.

‘La stranezza’ is finally the name of anguish, which Pirandello child learns by the voice of his nanny, a wise and not melancholy servant who gives him time whereas he would be in a hurry to skip the crossroads he just singled out. A crossroads which was already pretious for the child, as he can go back againg to remembering it in his adult age and in something which recurs, recurred however without any solution, even  worst accepting a ‘deviation’ into the theater when represented, and at least allowing him to exorcize the sharpness keeping so his anguish at a distance.

The director, as a matter of fact, acknowledges that Pirandello had been, in the years, gradually crystallizing his ‘oddity’, even making it a private makeshift shelter to extract dramatically insoluble, sublime knots and hopeless.  

However, right at the end[1], the intelligence of his daughter Lietta is offered to Pirandello, logically she fears the insults of a public made impetuous and warlike as involved in the hazard of the identification of person to character, a very risky drama-therapy. But Pirandello doesn’t take the help and here becomes father and pathogen pushing instead the unwilling and terrified Lietta - who should rely on his stoic virility - through the aggressive crowd well representing the furious rebelry of freudian ES, when  coarsely unties from the conscience censorship.

On the other hand, they find out the logic – a way not so evident of unconscious – the two foreign guests Pirandello invited, real but unaware authors of the fundamental ‘change’ made by the Master to the drama, and themselves theater amateurs, as well as professionally ‘coffincarriers’ at ‘Girgenti’[2], from which they come.

Patiently – one of the two has been even sleeping in the theater – they have been waiting until the great ‘Teatro Valle’ became quiet again after that rough storm, and now they find themselves satisfied in full conscience with the author of the work they attended[3].

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – December 14, 2022

[1] It has been reproduced the drama’s premiere, in 1921 at the ‘Teatro Valle’ – a historic theater due to its seniority not only in Rome but also in Europe – of ‘I sei personaggi in cerca d’autore’, maybe the most important work by Pirandello, whose text he had radically changed shortly before, because of something that had happened during a recent trip to his ‘Girgenti’.

[2] Since 1927 Girgenti is Agrigento.

[3] In 1934 Pirandello (Girgenti 1867 – Rome 1936) received the Nobel Prize for literature.