By Luisa Terzulli
On Monday 5th November came the second appointment with Italian theatre at the Riverside Studios. This time the artistic director Mariano D’Amora wanted to bring beyond the Channel a difficult show, Lo Zi’, interpreted by an excellent Mimmo Mancini.
The ticklish subject dealt with is the handicap, with Mancini who makes himself the spokesperson for the many different characters of the story: he is Vittorio, a kind of pettifogging clairvoyant, he is also his brother Benito, the “strepiato” (cripple), an infantile retarded person whose situation nobody is brave enough to really face, he is the village’s priest, the mayor, the late wife, he is one, no one, and one hundred thousand of the many figures crowding the vicissitudes.
With a natural use of Bitonto’s dialect (a town in the Italian southern region of Puglia) he moves from one self to the other, from scenes irreverently comic to the intensity of the forced loneliness to which many disabled persons are often obliged to. And so the show develops in an alternation of witticism and sobs, to slowly penetrate the deep world of the “cripples”, their feelings and their language, mirror of the surrounding world, good-looking, “healthy” and perfect.
The true message of Lo Zi’ is not a solution to the world’s problems, nor a precept about what can be done for the disabled and emarginated people, but about what we can do for ourselves, to fall out from our blindness, the fear or the coldness to diversity. Mimmo Mancini makes you laugh and moves you, and forces the spectator not to avoid the sight, even though just for fiction, of a “cripple”. And at the end of the evening, left behind the stage and the guise of his many characters, he seeks the exchange of views with the audience; he does not evade the confrontation with a reality which is in part his own life, and with the obstacles – not only architectural – that this show has to face during the touring performances in Italy.
Lo Zi’ is currently on stage in Italy, to check out dates and places of the show, please refer to the official website: www.lozi.it.
Copyright 2007 GIORGIOSTUDIO Ltd – All rights reserved
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