The Cambridge University Italian Society presents I Giganti della Montagna (The Mountain Giants) by Luigi Pirandello, played in Italian, with English captions displayed live, by a diverse cast of native and non-native Italian speakers and directed by Ludovico Nolfi, head of the international Theatre Company Ars in fieri. 

 

Immerse yourself in the enchanting world of I Giganti della Montagna, the unfinished theatrical masterpiece from the Trilogy of Myths. This whimsical comedy unfolds in an old abandoned theatre at the Villa of the Scalogna, where the Teatranti (the Theatricals), a penniless theatre troupe, meet the Scalognati (the Unfortunates), a group of strange ghosts led by the magician Cotrone. These magical souls have the power to bring dreams to life and transform the place into an enchanted setting, offering the actors a stage for the arrival of the Mountain Giants, mythical beings who embody the spasmodic development of humanity. In this dreamlike landscape, Pirandello explores the magical and liberating nature of art, and confronts the danger of the loss of beauty in a world increasingly caught up in the frenzy of production. In a thin boundary between reality and fantasy, the Teatranti and the Scalognati confront each other on utopia and on the need of every human being to seek naturalness, poetry and beauty in everyday life.

Luigi Pirandello (1867 –1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian dialect.

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"Souls, when they meet, have their own particular way of understanding each other, of entering into intimacy with each other, whereas our personas, when they relate to others, are often clumsy in their use of words, and fall into the bondage of social demands."  Luigi Pirandello