Milano: “Gilgamesh. The epic of he who saw everything” at the Carcano Theatre

Milano: “Gilgamesh. The epic of he who saw everything” at the Carcano Theatre.

Il Carcano Theater of Milano will host from 28 February at 5 March 2023 "Gilgamesh. The epic of he who saw everything", starring a trio of big names in theatre: Luigi Lo Cascio, Vincenzo Pirrotta and Giovanni Calcagno. The oldest epic poem in history brought to life to dialogue with our present.
The free verse text stitches together the fragments of the work received from the classical Babylonian version and other fragments from previous and subsequent eras, giving the story and consequently the listener a sense of completeness of the narrative arc and at the same time the possibility of a easy understanding of events rooted within a culture that is sometimes very distant from ours.
Gilgamesh is the oldest poem known to us. It is the story of a king who, after having experienced firsthand the pain of the death of his best friend, leaves his throne and the comforts of court to go in search of eternal life and the truth about the transience of human existence. Gilgamesh's experience, from a heroic point of view, is a total failure: his search for eternal life does not produce any results, and at the end of his story he is condemned to die like all other men. But there is perhaps something else that emerges from this story: the consequences of this desperate search for him are enormous and very profound even if relegated entirely to the sphere of interiority. They allow Gilgamesh to reach a different point of understanding the human events of life.
This experience of a new vision, more fresh and necessary than ever for us today, asks us to be transmitted and told. Convinced therefore that the text of the epic is a score to be played aloud, here we are ready to "remove the dust" from one of the greatest literary treasures of all time.

The alternation of the narrators on the scene will be punctuated by the projection of video compositions by Alessandra Pescetta inspired by the great themes of the poem: life, death, war.

Director's notes:
About two centuries ago, while excavating Ashurbanipal's library in Nineveh, archaeologists unearthed a series of tablets. When cuneiform writing was deciphered, they revealed the title of a poem: Of Him Who Saw the Depths and Foundations of the Earth. This is how he introduced himself, Gilgamesh, to us Westerners. When he had a first translation of the work, Rilke stated that he had never read anything so powerful, and later even Elias Canetti, after listening to some passages recited by an actor friend of his, expressed the need to deal with this text throughout the life.
The classic version of this epic, the one that has come down to us in the best state of preservation, was drawn up in Babylon between the eighth and seventh centuries BC by a priest named Sileqiunninni, who probably stitched together the work done by scribes and bards to two or more millennia. The tablets therefore contain a summary of the words and verses that narrators of all kinds sang for centuries from the Persian Gulf to the Caucasus.
Gilgamesh, through the testimonies that come to us from the Assyro-Babylonians, the Hittites and the Hurrians, thus opens up a view on the mysteries of knowledge and wisdom of one of the most advanced civilizations known to us, that of the Sumerians.
There have been many scholars who have tried to make sense of the adventures of Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu, and the subsequent journey of the king of Uruk to the ends of the world. There are those who have associated Gilgamesh with the Sun and Enkidu with the Moon, those who have seen in the twelve tablets the narration of the alternation of the influences of the stars on our planet in the cycle of a year, those who have interpreted this saga with the meter of modern psychology and he considered it a bildungsroman. There are still those who considered Gilgamesh only a hero, those who saw him as a demi-god, those who imagined him as a historical character, those who finally believe that the king of Uruk is only a mythical being.
Text and direction Giovanni Calcagno, with Luigi Lo Cascio, Vincenzo Pirrotta and Giovanni Calcagno; video compositions Alessandra Pescetta; original music Andrea Rocca; lighting design Vincenzo Bonaffini; scientific consultancy Luca Peyronel; production Emila Romagna ERT Theater / National Theatre.
PRICES
single numbered seat Friday, Saturday and Sunday €38,00
single numbered seat Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday €27,00
ONLINE SALES
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