“Eighteen actors passing the baton – explains Massimo Popolizio –; freed of all rhetoric, they focus the attention of the audience on the relentless rhythm of a rise to power that took place in a moment of profound weakness among institutions and political parties”. Thus Massimo Popolizio illustrates the script in thirty-one scenes that he has based on the novel M Il figlio del secolo by Antonio Scurati; moving, with a dense montage and an epic pace, the play spans the six year period (1919 - 1925) that followed the Great War, with the Fiume Enterprise, the country’s faltering steps towards the socialist revolution, the reaction and spread of Squadrismo, the daring March on Rome (for which October 2022 marks the centenary) and the relentless efficiency of a political doctrine that used violence to avoid the constraints of justice.
The leading figures are the founder of Fascism and his deputies, who we hear expressed in third and first person; Marinetti, D’Annunzio, Margherita Sarfatti, the antagonists Nicola Bombacci, Pietro Nenni and Giacomo Matteotti (also examined through the moving epistolary relationship with his wife Velia), Italo Balbo, the disbanded soldiers of the Great War and an entire mass of individuals who rose the ranks. And at the centre of the scene is the entire national community, that “dark country” that allowed dictatorship to take hold.