La Spezia, at the Civic Theater “Pour un oui ou pour un non” by Nathalie Sarraute

La Spezia, at the Civic Theater “Pour un oui ou pour un non” by Nathalie Sarraute.

The 2022-23 Prose Season at the Teatro Civico della Spezia ends with two doyens of Italian theatre, Umberto Orsini and Franco Branciaroli. On Tuesday 11 April at 20.45pm (repeat on Wednesday 12, again at 20.45pm) there will be a performance of Pour un oui ou pour un non (For a yes or a no), by Nathalie Sarraute, directed, sets and costumes by Pierluigi Pizzi, a production by Compagnia Orsini-Teatro de Gli Incamminati in collaboration with the Bresciano Theater Center.

Orsini and Branciaroli will also close the Foyer – Teatro Civico al Pin exhibition and will meet the public at the PIN on Wednesday 12 April at 18pm, together with the artistic director of the Teatro Civico Alessandro Maggi.

The comedy by Nathalie Sarraute, one of the most important French writers of the second half of the twentieth century and who occupied an important place in the alchemy between the theater of the absurd and the theater of everyday life, places the strength of words in a web of incomparable skill. Two friends who meet again after an unmotivated separation question themselves about the reasons for their separation and discover that it was the silences between the words spoken and above all the ambiguities of the "intonations" that deformed their communication, opening it up to multiple and varied meanings.

Each "intonation" can be interpreted in various ways by the mood of the listener. This is the central theme of Pour un oui ou pour un non, a title that can simply be translated as "For a yes or for a no" but which in reality means much more and which in our language has only an apparent mirror value .

The correct translation of the title, instead of For a yes or for a no, would perhaps have been For a trifle: the play is in fact the story of how a friendship can break up over a trifle. For a yes or a no it is that nothing that can change everything, that nothing that causes deep lacerations, incurable wounds.

Sarraute's prose, in its complexity, is a testing ground for two manipulators of the word such as Branciaroli and Orsini who find themselves on the scene after many years to give life with their ability to the terrible game of massacre that the comedy envisages.

Info and tickets: La Spezia Civic Theater Box Office (entrance from via Carpenino) – opening hours: Monday to Saturday 8.30am/12pm, Wednesday also from 16pm to 19pm – tel. 0187-727521 – email: info@teatrocivico.it