Forty years on from the death of Eduardo, his Tempest for marionettes is brought back to the stage by Carlo Colla & Figli. Created in 1985 on the basis of a suggestion by Franco Quadri, the then-director of the Theatrical Sector of the Venice Biennial, and by Luca De Filippo, the idea of staging the version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest translated by Eduardo De Filippo for the marionette theatre immediately won over the Carlo Colla & Figli Puppetry Company, attracted by its enthusiasm and emotion both in terms of the worth of the script and the enchanting personality of the translator.
Through the richness of the Neapolitan language, the poetry of the great Neapolitan writer brought out the “popular” aspect of a work that had been visited and revisited by philosophical and intellectual interpretations, and this version emerged as the most intense and concrete link to puppet theatre, which renders the world of fantasy tangible through theatrical magic and enchantment. This version sees The Tempest as a great adventure, a tale in which the main characters lie at the centre of a world of colour, sound, allegory and symbolism; the world of theatrical magic, stage tricks and supernatural creatures; a world in which everything appears to be true for the ingenuity and candour with which every moment is experienced, perhaps even off stage. There are a multitude of characters, more than one hundred, counting spirits, elves and demons, and the locations on the island are many, seen through the constant wandering of the characters in their search to find themselves and their catharsis, in the eternal enchantment that envelops the action on stage, in the end highlighting the lesson that Eduardo understood, in all its topicality, when he undertook his task as translator and poet.