Enrico Guarneri: “My Inspector General from Gogol’s Russia to Sicily”

“The classics still and always communicate, centuries later they remain current: they are Great precisely because they do not deal with simple daily facts but the themes of humanity that are universal and overcome temporal and geographical distances. For this reason a great work born in Sicily , I am thinking for example of Pirandello or Verga, it leaves the island borders; and other great works born in France or perhaps in Russia can very well be represented as if they were Sicilian “. The latest example proposed to AdnKronos by Ernesto Guarneri, a theatrical actor with strong traditions in Catania, is not only ‘scholastic’ but very topical, given that until January 16 he staged at the Quirino theater in Rome, as director and leading actor, a ‘Inspector General’ by Nikolaj Gogol with very recognizable traces of the musicality of the Sicilian dialect. “The characters proposed by the great authors will always remain valid – explains Guarneri – whether they belong to classical or modern dramaturgy. In this show, I try to give form and word to both the dramatic and the comic aspects of the character, without space and time; with the most classic of literary and theatrical mechanisms which is that of misunderstanding. By proposing this Sicilian Gogol, for the first time, on the Continent. Moreover – he adds – you can discover many points of contact between the Russian soul and the Sicilian and southern soul: indolence, slowness, fatalism, bitter humor … “. Humor that will not miss in the story traced by Gogol, which starts from the news of the arrival in a remote town of an inspector general directly from the capital: that he came to investigate seems the most obvious thing, but to investigate who and why? “Behind this brilliant plot – Guarneri observes in his director’s notes – unfolds the most ferocious, irreverent, corrosive satire of power that a theater author has ever conceived. And since its debut in Petersburg in 1836, this comedy has never stopped to entertain with his acrid humor, steeped in poison “. (by Enzo Bonaiuto)