Theater
Teatro Verdi di Gorizia
190 minutes and intermission
La Cripta dei Cappuccini (The Emperor’s Tomb)
by Joseph Roth
Italian translation Laura Terreni
adaptation Giacomo Pedini and Jacopo Giacomoni
directed by Giacomo Pedini
dramaturg Jacopo Giacomoni
set design Alice Vanini
costumes Gianluca Sbicca and Francesca Novati
music Cristian Carrara
performed in a recording by FVG Orchestra
conductor Paolo Paroni
lights Stefano Laudato
sound and phonics Corrado Cristina
assistant director Francesca Lombardi
language coach Francesco Borchi
with Natalino Balasso (Franz-Ferdinand Trotta)
and with (in alphabetical order)
Nicola Bortolotti (Joseph Branco)
Primož Ekart (Count Chojnicki)
Francesco Migliaccio (Manes Reisiger/Baron Kovacs)
Ivana Monti (Mr.s Trotta)
Alberto Pirazzini (Bubi Kovacs/doc. Grünhut/Sentinel)
Camilla Semino Favro (Elisabeth Kovacs)
Giovanni Battista Storti (Jacques/Adolf Feldmann/Jadlowker)
Simone Tangolo (Kurt von Stettenheim/Jan Baranovitsch/Soldier/Friar)
Matilde Vigna (Jolanth Szatmary)
stage director Alberto Antonel
stagehand Elisabetta Ferrandino
chief electrician Ivan Bortolus
electrician Enrico Mansutti
props master Gaia Agozzino
make-up and hairstyling Nicole Tomaini
video services Entract Multimedia
tailoring and assistant personnel Servizi Teatrali srl
scenes made at Emilia Romagna Teatro Fondazione workshop
costumes by Bàste srls
staging director and coordinator Stefano Laudato
production Associazione Mittelfest
photo © Luca A. d’Agostino – Phocus Agency
Natalino Balasso is Trotta, the protagonist of The Emperor’s Tomb, the famous novel by Joseph Roth. The parable of an awkward viveur, from his dissolute adolescence in early 20th-century Vienna to the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, who passes unscathed and unaware through the Great War, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the economic boom of the 1920s, the upheaval of customs and libertarian and liberticidal impulses. He is a man overwhelmed by events, unable to embrace the fashions of the time, groping in a shattered Central European world of dissolute friends, foolish cousins, tyrannical mothers, ambiguous wives and girlfriends, adventurers, braggarts, failed soldiers and nobles: a barren age with no future, which in its variety is so reminiscent of the Europe of a hundred years later. It is a merry-go-round, a babel, a satire of nostalgic aristocrats, rampant profiteers and drawing-room progressives, swirling around a lonely man as he tries to understand himself together with the audience.
