Theatre: L'Empireo

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'I love the epic, I love the chorus, I love the tragicomic nuance: The Empyrean is all of this together. And that's not all: it tells a compelling story. It is a contemporary text that dares to be set in the 1700s, precisely in March 1759. A contemporary text in costume? No way!’
Serena Sinigaglia brings to the stage L'Empireo (The Welkin), the most recent text by British playwright Lucy Kirkwood, winner in 2014 of the Laurence Olivier Award, the highest accolade in British theatre, whose plays are hosted and produced by the National Theatre and the Royal Court Theatre in London. Translated by Monica Capuani and Francesco Bianchi, L'Empireo (The Welkin) is presented for the first time in Italy. ‘L'Empireo is an extremely monumental and ambitious text: set in the mid 18th century in rural England, it tells the story of a jury of twelve women summoned by a judge who cannot execute a girl for murder because she claims to be pregnant,’ writes Capuani, journalist and translator, a point of reference for English and French theatre literature. ’The female jury will have to decide the truth or otherwise of this claim, and will thus have the power of life and death over her. From this female microcosm, the fundamental and timeless issues of women's lives in any era emerge. First of all, the unfair treatment that the law written by men still exerts on women and their bodies‘’.
Sinigaglia continues, ‘Empireo is the first play I have come across that tackles gender issues and does so without conceding anything to rhetoric or banality. It is dry, rough, true, on a par with reality. It also gives space to actresses, 19 characters of which 17 are female. A nice inversion from the average of characters conceived and written for women'.

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