For the past forty years Gabriel Lavia has been among Italian theatre’s most representative figures. Here he directs this early success by Pirandello, today considered one of the Sicilian Nobel prize winner’s classic plays.

Gabriele Lavia is one of Pirandello’s most passionate and effective interpreters. Here he plays the humble clerk Ciampa who needs a claim of insanity to keep up the respectable façade of his unhappy marriage. Ciampa is the first of Pirandello’s great characters to take bitter revenge on the humiliations of an entire lifetime.
Pirandello wrote this play in 1916 in the Sicilian dialect for the actor Angelo Musco; in 1918 he completed the Italian version which was performed five years later by the Gastone Monaldi company. “There is no doubt, says Lavia, that this “very dark comedy” is more lively and poignant in Sicilian. We will do a mix of the “first” and “second” version of this “mirror” of a humanity that bases its ability to coexist “civilly” on lies. Il berretto a sonagli is the first radical example of “expressionist” Italian theatre, extremely bitter, comical and cruel, a fierce kind of expressionism that aims to represent a society suffering from the “sickness of lies”.
Through a perspective that is lucid and very contemporary, the performance uncovers all the hypocrisy and superficiality that too often rule our lives.