Rem & Cap, 1988.
Written and directed by Claudio Remondi and Riccardo Caporossi
With Claudio Remondi, Riccardo Caporossi
Light Amerigo Varesi
Stagehand Piero Cegalin
Electrical equipment Art Sound
Organization Sandra Ugolini
Set photographer Cesare Accetta
First performance Teatro Orione, 12 January 1988
Rem & Cap: staging the authors’ ‘ideal projections’
by Sabrina Galasso
After a period of sole directing work, Remondi and Caporossi returned to the stage in February 1988 with Rem & Cap, which opened at the Orione theatre in Rome.
Two seemingly lifeless suits on stage suddenly move, inhabited by two characters – Rem and Cap – who slowly untangle themselves from each other and make their way towards a double door at their backs. As they enter the door, two spaces are revealed. There are chairs arranged in the two spaces which allow us to interpret them as ‘houses’: Rem’s ‘house’ and Cap’s ‘house’. After a couple of brief ‘mistakes’ (the two join again outside to swap gloves, as if they had taken each other’s, and swap houses, as if they had entered the wrong space) each character returns to his own space. Here, they busy themselves with daily domestic gestures: getting undressed, hanging their clothes up on the doors, eating an apple, sewing the holes in a pair of socks, humming a melody. Rem tries to pay his neighbour a visit, an attempt which fizzles out when Cap doesn’t answer the door. The two characters will only meet again outside of their homes, meticulously dressed up once more like at the beginning of the show, both standing still and silent on stage.
Rem & Cap has a verbal text not dissimilar to the many scores the duo produced over the course of their work together. It’s divided into fifteen scenes introduced by a prologue, and structured following the minimal score of movements present in the piece: arrival; arrival / separation; separation; towards the house; entering the house; in the house; re-exiting the house; re-entering in the dark; in the dark in the house; house swap; in the house; undressed in the house; in the whiteness; visit; departure.
Documents are published in original language. In case the translation is present, both the original and the translation are published.
Rem & Cap, 1988.
Claudio Remondi and Riccardo Caporossi, Script of Rem & Cap, in Sabrina Galasso, Il teatro di Remondi e Caporossi (1970-1995), Bulzoni, Rome 1998.
The photos, from the archive of Remondi and Caporossi, were published in S. Galasso, The theater of Remondi and Caporossi (1970-1995), Bulzoni, Rome 1998. Photo by Cesare Accept, Bob Van Dantzig, Tommaso Le Pera, Carlo Manzato, Antonio Sperlazzo. All rights reserved.
Rem & Cap,
montaggio Ali Gol Mohammad Zadeh e Riccardo Caporossi.
Aggeo Savioli, Una porta tra Rem e Cap, «l'Unità», January 14, 1988
Franco Quadri, Tanti gesti paralleli con irresistibile gag. Remondi e Caporossi in duplicato, «la Repubblica», January 14, 1988
Marco Palladini, Stanlio e Ollio anni '80. «Né con te né senza di te», «Paese Sera», January 19, 1988