Fratello mio, Caino! (Brother, Cain!)

                        What is the sin which is not
Sin in itself? Can circumstance make sin
Or virtue? If it doth, we are the slaves

Lord Byron

Paradise is not far away, it is a place that stands between me and those who are willing to listen to me. If my words fall into the void, I might as well go down to hell. If no one wants to sit beside me, my breath becomes useless. We are here for the Show. We enter the theatre and occupy a seat, we choose it carefully, close to those who know and share our thoughts, so that we can discuss it and feel free to make our opinion resonate. But this fortune is not always given to us, we are often alone, not so much in everyday life, but in that endless and timeless space that dwells within us. There we can meet Cain. We can sit next to him and listen from the beginning how it was that he became the first killer for all of us. In the afterword the translator Lucia Anessi writes – Cain is in every man.

Cain is inside us, when we are not supported by a faith that smoothes over everything, and we wear ourselves out in a desperate inner struggle, when we investigate the eternal questions in a struggle of queries without an answer; he is inside us when the vertical direction of our desire for the infinity, is amputated by a frustrating reality. Cain is the image of the individual who leads his struggle in his own spirit and creates his own salvation in it. We will ask the audience to sit alone and listen to the story of Cain rewritten by Byron. For each spectator an empty chair, an unbalance, a loneliness, a dizziness, a leap into the void, over the abyss in spaces where we can see around us the paradise and next to us a brother.

Fratello mio, Caino (2011)

by TeatrInGestAzione, inspired by Lord Byron’s Cain
created and directed by
Gesualdi | Trono

with the inmates of the State Prison for Mentally Insane F. Saporito in Aversa (Italy)