"For this show no hen was mistreated" jokes Emma Dante, who debuts tomorrow at the Melato studio theater in Milan with 'Re Chiccinella', the third show taken from Basile's 'Cunto de li cunti', closing the trilogy composed of ' La Scortecata' and 'Sugar Pupo'.
The protagonist of the piece, which mixes grotesque, comic and tragic elements, is a king who, seized by a bodily need, makes the tragic mistake of using an animal that he believes to be dead, a hen, to clean himself.
The feather, far from dead, sticks to his backside and climbs up the bowels, settling in the sovereign's insides.
The magical animal, like a tapeworm, devours everything the poor man eats, causing him to expel golden eggs.
Exhausted by this, the king decides to let himself die of hunger, encountering opposition from the entire court, who does not want to deprive himself of the golden eggs.
"King Chicchinella - says the director - tells the story of a sick sovereign, alone and without hope, surrounded by an affectionless and icy family who have only one interest, receiving a golden egg a day. The animal lives and feeds inside him, slowly devouring his insides, until the king discovers that for the world he and the hen are the same thing."
In Basile's fairy tale the protagonist is not a hen but a duck, which defecates gold shields, just as the king is not a leading character, but Dante wanted him as the protagonist to tell of "poverty, greed and hypocrisy of a family that pretends to love him but in reality only wants titles, money and power from him."
On the bare stage, characteristic of the playwright, there is also a real hen, Odette, "who is part of the company, when she is not performing she lives in the house of one of the actors and a chicken coop was built for her at the Studio theatre, where there is now It stinks a little, but that's part of life too."
Given the absence of scenography, the work on the actors was long: "they worked on the posture of the body as if they were wearing masks, their presence is a story of landscapes that fills the void of the stage".
And everything - underlines the director - is the result of meticulous preparation: "the older I get the more important it becomes - Dante confides - for me it is essential that everything is impeccable. Maybe the show will be bad, but done well, because I am terrified of sloppiness , of carelessness, of the poor quality of life and relationships. The theater par excellence is a place of relationships and if there is sloppiness - he underlines - there is no human exchange".
It is thanks to "the art of serving and caring" that that space is created which allows the flow of emotions conveyed by the word "generated by the body", a 17th century Neapolitan language adapted from Basile's writing, with words which still remain "inaccessible" but are not an obstacle because they "come directly from the body" of the actors.
Or, in some cases, from that of a hen named Odette who - guarantees Emma Dante, who on March 9th will receive the 'The forms of cinema' award from the looks elsewhere Women's international film festival - "is treated very well and will not be eaten at the end of the show."
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