On New Year’s Eve, in a typical hotel lobby, the famous actor Bernhard Minetti, now elderly and disenchanted, waits to play the role of King Lear for the last time. He abandons himself to his memories, to reflections on his life and on acting, and on the fascinating mechanisms of theatre, expressing all his disdain for classical literature and expressing scathing criticism of an increasingly confused society and a theatre that is ever more devoid of sense... From the height of his more than sixty years’ career, spent with masterpieces by Shakespeare, Beckett, Sophocles, and Dostoevsky, Glauco Mauri takes on the work of Thomas Bernhard.
«The scene in which the pages turn, or the curtain raises on Bernhard – explains the director Andrea Baracco – is that of the day after; the explosion has happened, it is behind us now. The world, only apparently intact, has been deeply affected; folly, cold, disease and devastation, spinning madly and following an orbit that is indecipherable and absurd. The survivors, who are still able to speak, examine this chaos, this disturbance. They try to understand it and to counter it with thoughtless determination, aware as they are that this can only lead to physical and mental breakdown. The only chance for survival appears to be a search for perfection in fields that until recently were places of beauty and of meaning; theatre, music, literature, and philosophy.»