Edipus. 1994

Edipus (1994)

by Giovanni Testori
directed by Federico Tiezzi
scenography by Pier Paolo Bisleri
costumes by Giovanna Buzzi
lights by Juray Saleri
with Sandro Lombardi
Debut: Firenze, Teatro di Rifredi, 13 January 1994

Sandro Lombardi, Edipus (1994). Presentation

by Andrea Scappa
Edipus is the last play Testori wrote, in 1977, for his Trilogia degli Scarrozzanti, comprising two other two chapters, L’Ambleto (1972) and Macbetto (1974).
Edipus was part of a directorial triptych with which Magazzini intended to explore the Oedipal relationship between father and son. Alongside Testori’s Porcile, written by Pier Paolo Pasolini and also staged in 1994, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which he did various versions of in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. In these three texts the presence of cumbersome paternal shadows, the powerful Laius in Edipus, Mr. Klotz the wealthy landowner in Porcile, the ghost of the murdered king in Hamlet, enabled Magazzini to question the fact that “fathers have reason on their side and sons have vision on theirs. In the end the sons realize that reason governs vision, enabling it to be communicated.” So, for Magazzini, after dealing with the multilingualism of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Testori’s language, magmatic, earthy and baroque, contaminated by dialects, Latinisms and Frenchisms, stood as yet another object of investigation in the language of “an Italy that doesn’t exist, literary, dialectal and lowly.”
Edipus is also the story of a wandering hack actor who, after he has been ditched by the lead actor, who has been cast as a transvestite in a cabaret company, and by the leading actress, who has shacked up with a furniture maker from Meda (a small town near Milan), must play all the parts in Sophocles’ tragedy: Laius king of Thebes, Jocasta his wife, Oedipus their son, and the god Dionysus.