What happens when a classic gets out of the theatre?

Since the nineteenth century Juliet and Romeo’s story has become something less as well as something more than a masterpiece. The two young lovers have cast off their original context and have become ‘absolute’ characters. Living characters, family ghosts. What happens when love can’t fall asleep? It gets out of poetry books, it leaves the stage. And when it takes to the streets, everything may occur.

"Amor mai non s’addorme" opens with the arrival of a blindfolded young girl. When the blindfold falls down, a group of people are standing in front of her: Juliet and Romeo at the centre. On the two sides the Nurse, Friar Lawrence, Mercutio, the Officer, Tybalt. Lady Montague is standing in front of the girl. They are as pale as ghosts, covered in blood as the main characters of a tragedy’s last scene, ready to obsessively repeat their key line and show their wounds. At the same time they are alive, unaware, trepidant and funny as characters at the beginning of a new story.

What are they going to do? They are ghosts, willing to show their blood uselessly shed, to repeat the words and gestures that took them to the catastrophe, characters who remember to be dead, ready to rail at each other. However, they are also human beings in the flesh, comic and tragic at the same time, full of joie de vivre, all ready to love and fight, to dance, even to forgive. And Juliet and Romeo are just two kids who don’t know yet that they are going to fall in love. At the same time, however, they are also ghosts of kids killed beforehand. They are two dancing ghosts. The square where they live is in a Verona made of shadows, of the memory of a vanished youth, of a live and kicking violence.

In the middle of this chaos the young girl spies, observes and hides, protected, as it should be, by an officer, a police officer in full-dress uniform. She appears and disappears, keeping on the edge, but it’s hard for her to keep out of the story up to the end. She’ll get in eventually, no doubt about that. The reason is that, with the passing of time, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ has changed and it’s not just poetry anymore, it’s a memory that joins us all. It’s a story of eroticism and violence, a story of young murderers, sent to a useless death. It’s a present day fairytale, belonging to us and to which we all belong.

Dedicated to Vincenzo Bonomini, early nineteenth century’s artist from Bergamo, who painted the skeletons’ smile.