In 1977, in the wake of L’Ambleto and Macbetto, Edipus marked the completion for Giovanni Testori of his Trilogia degli scarrozzanti, created for the talented Franco Parenti: a fantastical reinventing of the tragic, grotesque and desperate world of a group of common ham actors wandering the suburbs of Italy, contaminating the mythical and elevated world of performance with personal stories, setting in motion a theatrical mechanism of prodigious and intense drama in which Sophocles and Shakespeare share space with the curtain raiser, melodrama meets variety, and myth and reality come together.
The leading figure of this latest chapter is an abandoned company lead; the main actor has chosen to perform as a transvestite in a cabaret group, while the main actress has abandoned her trade to marry a cabinetmaker from Brianza. Night after night, the wandering artist is forced to stage Sophocles’s Oedipus, performing all of the roles himself, from Laius to Jocasta, and from Oedipus to Dionysus. As his chaotic show unfolds, the story is inevitably contaminated with that of his disastrous personal life.
Thirty years after first performing under the direction of Federico Tiezzi, Sandro Lombardi returns to the role of Edipus that led Franco Quadri to write: «Who would have thought that a Tuscan from the Casentino area would become the ideal performer for Giovanni Testori?».