Henry IV

With Sebastiano Lo Monaco, Mariàngeles Torres, Claudio Mazzenga, Rosario Petix, Luca Iacono,
and with Sergio Mancinelli, Francesco Iaia, Giulia Tomaselli, Marcello Montalto,
Gaetano Tizzano, Tommaso Garrè

direction and sets Yannis Kokkos
costumes Paola Mariani
lights Jacopo Pantani
artistic collaborator Anne Blancard
assistant director Stephan Grögler
assistant set designer Cleo Laigret

production of the SiciliaTeatro Association, the Biondo Theater of Palermo, the Teatro Stabile of Catania, the Teatro Stabile of the Veneto

A significant challenge for the contemporary era is to build a critical society, in which critical observers are present who are able on the one hand to promote a culture of thought and reflection and on the other to make informed decisions. The production of Enrico IV by Luigi Pirandello, directed by Yannis Kokkos, combines and makes available to the viewer the gaze of one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century filtered by the culture and experience of one of the most incisive and esteemed living directors. The spectator is welcomed, almost without his knowledge, into a psychoanalytic session from which he will come out, at the end of the show, with many and relevant questions about his experience. As it is known, in fact, Luigi Pirandello developed in his theater the then nascent themes of depth psychology, referable to the studies of Sigmund Freud and the subsequent Frankfurt School. Enrico IV is a text with which great Italian and European actors have measured themselves. Sebastiano Lo Monaco, after the fertile meeting with Yannis Kokkos, in Sophocles’ Oedipus a Colonus, in 2018, at the Greek Theater of Syracuse, decided to bring it to the stage, thus continuing his research around the Pirandello world. Thus, the theme of madness, present in works such as “The bells cap” and in “Cosi è, se vi pare”, already interpreted by Lo Monaco, is transformed into a representation of madness, to the point of exhibiting it. After all, Enrico, in order to be able to show it through a conscious fiction, must come to his senses and lay bare the relationship between mask and unmasking, reciting madness and highlighting the metateatral character that can be applied to the text.

Who better than the actor, who doubles himself every evening, can play madness? Who better than him can play the theater of the unconscious, given that every evening he undergoes a psychoanalytic session? The actor pretends, just like Enrico, who, through fiction, forces others, in turn, to pretend.
In this way, the ambiguous game of fiction returns, which is no longer combined with reality, but with madness, so much so that the well-known formula “fiction or reality?” Turns into “Fiction or Madness?”. For Enrico, madness is the only possible fiction. The question that remained open in the “Six Characters” finds an answer in “Henry IV”. Is it a question of revenge? Of revenge? No, simply by refusing bourgeois hypocrisy, which Enrico enjoys mocking, transforming himself into an eccentric jester in order to be able to shout at others: “Buffoons, buffoons”, showing, after all, his true illness which consists in melancholy, which has become mania, after so many years of solitude.