Often when we choose a show, we do so because we hope to see represented the right answers we would like to find in life, delegating to the curtain, which rises and closes, the role of our reference analyst in a busy group session. Iln the role we play in private and in society, we are thus able to identify with the protagonists and merge with the story, empathizing with them and with the unfamiliar audience sitting next to us. Everyone will see himself or herself in the character, loving or loathing it according to the lived fragments it represents. Generally, the roles are well delineated and roughly represent love stories with not always happy endings. It will be more the heroines who will destroy themselves for this feeling, for the attainment of an ideal that still sends most of the audience astray, who will have the greatest approval of the viewers, predominantly female, even if the villain on duty with his perversion will fascinate the remaining part, so much so that they will be hurt when this one perishes forcing the action to make him leave the scene in this way. Fortunately, both those who swoon with love and those who wish others destruction will, once they retire to their dressing rooms, resume civilian clothes and, in turn, probably seek new answers, as will the audience. But there is one opera that more than any other is the bearer of enigmas. Of that sick love that often affects us all, and not because we lack it, of love, if anything, we have lacked the example and warmth that should nurture the exact opposite of whim and possession.
Salome
Strauss’ Salome is the example. And the play is well defined in Lavia’s directorial revival. He is a specialist in family psycho-dramas and outlines, with great analytical sense, all its aesthetic perversion, underscored by music caged in its inability to explode into a true concept of love. Salome is adolescent love, the immature and sensuality-less love that finds in arrogance the only possibility of being exercised. she is a daughter never seen through the eyes of benevolence, who, unable to feel family protection, finds in the antibodies of neurosis the unhealthy possibility of filling her voids. She wants love, acceptance, just this while not really knowing what it is and repaying, yet another rejection, with deprivation of life, of the other. Deprivation accorded at great cost with the selling out of Salome’s intimacy to her stepfather and under the cold eyes of a mother who, if she does not incentivize her daughter’s behavior, certainly does not restrain it but more importantly, educates it. Commonly, Salome’s dance is portrayed with an ideal of femininity embraced with sensuality. In this case the dance is a revelation of panic attacks, frayed nerves feeding a girl’s frustrations, deprived of the only nourishment a child needs: loving care. Thus arriving at total destruction, both physical and moral. And it is thrown in our faces, with no concealment of the obscenities of life that happen every day, seemingly locked up within the walls of the home, in our own homes or those nearby. The play can yes make us dream and run far away, but at the same time it has the ability to nail us to the ground and tell us that that never resolved family is all of us who, in order not to grow up, in order to save appearances, prefer to receive the head of the enemy, of the one who cannot see us. Served on a silver platter preferably for breakfast.
The opera buffa
The slap is strong but the work does not always have to be reassuring. For that there is the opera buffa, the fairy tale that materializes every seemingly impossible dream by making us escape from our daily labors. Where we can finally find ourselves in brilliant and resolute protagonists who never bend, despite the fact that fate puts them to the test as, for example, happens with Cinderella who, stripped of all magical connotations, succeeds in the feat of making the sad existence of the title character make a consistent evolution. Two opposite examples of protagonists in search of themselves and of love: in the first case, sick, with ostentation of familial formality; in the second, more authentic and pure, where the masks of appearance falling reveal the pettiness of the nest of origin. Both longing to know the totalizing embrace of mercy albeit with totally different outcomes. The solution is the continuous search within ourselves, as well as for the work that best represents the right answers to our anxieties.