Snapshots from the direction of Ferdinando Ceriani

After a year of work in the Aula Magna, here we are again, for the third year, as guests of the Teatro Valle. We're regulars now! We get everything done with impressive speed. This year, we’re staging Shakespeare! There’s a hint of reverential awe among the students. The dressing rooms are silent. The “Hamlets,” the “Romeos,” the “Julietts,” and the “Falstaffs” retreat to the darkest corners at the back of the stage to recite their lines from memory, as if they were praying a rosary. The audience fans themselves in the heat with the show's brochures. The final applause hits us like a “storm.”

Directed by Ferdinando Ceriani and Angelo Guidi

May 21, 2006, 9:00 PM
Teatro Valle, Rome

Over the past few years, we’ve explored key moments in the history of theater with our students, from studying “Six Characters in Search of an Author” to the Theater of the Absurd, and from 20th-century Italian dramaturgy to Commedia dell’Arte. Our playful wanderings have, on more than one occasion, brought us into contact with an extraordinary world—one that is infinitely deep and universal, never obvious, never outdated, and never predictable: the works of William Shakespeare. In our previous works, we gazed at it from afar, somewhat apprehensive, knowing that sooner or later, we would find ourselves facing it. And now here we are! For those in the theater world, Shakespeare is a touchstone, a guide, an endless encyclopedia in which we can all see ourselves. Our aim was to guide the students on a journey that would connect them with some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays—Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth, and The Tempest—highlighting the remarkably modern nature of the emotions and situations the English playwright depicts. To do this, we chose a dramaturgical adaptation by Franco Molè, revisited by Angelo Guidi. Starting with the famous Shakespearean line, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Guidi leads us to relive the key moments of these plays, magically conjured by the witches in Macbeth. And so, on the same stage, we find Falstaff attending the Montague feast, Friar Laurence playing chess with the Ghost, and Mercutio, slain by Tybalt, being carried away by Hamlet’s gravediggers. This overlapping of events follow a thread that may seem illogical, unraveled by the witches who shape their course, leading to the inevitable fulfillment of their destinies—tragic for some, grotesque for others. But now, let's unleash the winds of our imagination and let the show begin!

Students | Leading actors

• Francesca Berti
• Nicoletta Capaldo
• Emanuela Cappuccini
• Maria Ginevra Cattaneo
• Giulia Colucci
• Nadia Correale
• Marco Cozzolino Coletta
• Silvia Crisalli
• Riccardo Crocetta
• Enrica De Carlo
• Mirto De Leonardis
• Tommaso Di Chio
• Giuseppe Di Paola
• Carmelo Dragotta
• Edoardo Faraci
• Festuccia Flaminia
• Giampaolo Filauro
• Valeria Flagiello
• Andrea Gagliano
• Eleonora Galterio
• Domenico Giurato
• Giuseppe Guglielmino
• Giuseppe Labate
• Roberto Lato
• Giuseppe Lo Papa
• Paola Montone
• Lina Neri
• Delia Nicotra
• Simone Oddo
• Valerio Pilia
• Antonio Rinaldi
• Federico Roli
• Caterina Romano
• Fabio Massimo Silvetti
• Tortorici, Dèsirée
• Alessandro Tribulato
• Federica Vinci