Valerio Binasco is the leading representative in Italy of the theatre of Jon Fosse, thanks to stagings that reveal the influence that the past has on the present, with a precision that is almost Proustian. The Norwegian author, born in 1959, loves to say of himself: «I am a writer who is highly critical of language. What I mean is that the most important things cannot be said (either in a dialogue expressed through everyday language, nor through conceptual language) – and this is what my poetry consists of, saying the unspeakable.»
In this play – with Pamela Villoresi in the lead role, joined on stage by Binasco, Michele Di Mauro, Giordana Faggiano and Isabella Ferrari – a middle-aged woman paints a portrait of a young woman sitting on a sofa, and battles against her doubts over her own skills as an artist and her inability to paint. The image that torments her – that of the young woman hunched on a sofa – is a snapshot of herself in her youth, tormented by a myriad of uncertainties; she quarrels with her mother and envies her elder sister, and craves the return of her father with a passion that borders on the illicit. Binasco masterfully explores the way in which the psychological wounds inflicted during childhood never completely heal.