During the warm evenings of this past August in Siracusa, ‘The Clouds’ by Aristophanes reappears in the theatre, invoked by the direction of Antonio Calenda. Gracefully dressed in colourful puffy tulle fabric, dancing against a simple stage-set of neoclassical taste, they guide us lightly to a complex experience of existence.
‘The Clouds’ under Calenda are “a Brechtian, surreal, uneasy and crudely comical version”, to use the director's own words, in which the Ancient Comedy written around the time of the Peloponnesian War, is dressed in modern clothes, where Past and Present shake hands warmly in a mixing of stories of the past but which are still relevant today.
The performance starts and an upside-down world briefly eludes the rules of everyday life, allowing the audience to be entertained by that carnival-like hilarity which challenges the fear of existential problems and an uncertain future. It is that famous “onomasti komodein”, the comical mocking of Socrates which builds up, line after line, a “present” composed of many contradictions, in which, almost out of necessity, tradition and innovation, old and new, different generations clash, with deforming results. It is in the dialogue between Worst Speech and Best Speech that the whole match is then played. The nice citation of La Signorina Felicita by Guido Gozzano, inserted intp the text translated by Nicola Cadoni, reaffirms the weight of a final battle with a given result:
““Smell of the Shadows! Smell of the Past, smell of desperate abandonment!”
”