MY BRILLIANT FRIEND Will Be Performed at Wroclawski Teatr Wspolczesny

The cast includes Anna Błaut, Anna Kieca, Ewelina Paszke-Lowitzsch, Paulina Wosik, Mariusz Bąkowski, and Jerzy Senator.

By: Stephi Wild Jul. 31, 2021

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND Will Be Performed at Wroclawski Teatr Wspolczesny Image

The novels by Elena Ferrante - collectively known as the Neapolitan Novels or, after the title of the first book, My Brilliant Friendó - are a literary phenomenon of the last few years that has caused the Ferrante fever in many readers. The Italian author is an identity specialist: her full name is a pseudonym, while speculation has been circling around about who the „real" Ferrante is and to what extent her books might be autobiographical. The identity in progress - one that slips through the known patterns, but also clashes with the social expectations and personal projections - is also the major subject matter of this novel cycle.

The history of Elena's life - and the story of her friendship with Lila - is an uncompromising and twisted variation on the topic of Bildungsroman, with a female protagonist, rather than a male one, set in the reality that is as picturesque [Naples], as it is ordinary [the portrait of a society with exclusion in the background]. The novel that is captivating, but most of all embarrassingly honest and breaks the link with idealisation, in order to replace it with ruthless introspection.

The change in optics proposed by Ferrante allows us to look into the classical topics of the European art - such as adolescence, formation of an artist, shaping of a social consciousness - from a radically feminine perspective - the one that puts women's experience, but also the experience of those and of what is often omitted or excluded, right in the centre.

The show based on the motives from the tetralogy is a challenge to the theatre, the attempt to reconcile the epic momentum with the intimate privacy, the social involvement with the extremely personal viewpoint, and finally the attempt to appreciate the everyday life, to look at it without the redundancy of mythology and toxic phantasies. It is also an attempt to give a theatrical response to the identity performance created by Ferrante - a separate one, but a response that is always shaped by the interaction with others, in movement, in experience, in action.