BURROW, THE

Original titleBURROW, THE
CategoryPlay
AgegroupAdults
Cast5 total (5 F)
Variable cast sizeNo
RepresentationNordic representation
LanguagesEnglish
In “The Burrow” (IDI Contest Prize 1990; Maschera Prize with golden laurel for the five actresses and a gold medal for stage direction in 1993; broadcast on Italian radio (RAI 3) in 1995; presented at the Grec festival in Barcelona in 1997; a new production in Italy (Parma) in 2000; another is scheduled for Brescia in 2001; and Croatia (Fiume) in October of the same year) five women find themselves reliving the consequences, some of them tangible, of a painful episode which three of the protagonists have been trying to forget. When they meet up again one orrid summers day in the 1980s, it is an emotional re-immersion in their own doubt and fears, with the hope of perhaps freeing themselves of them. Using unity of space and time, in a garden in the countryside which would seem to make for peace and serenity, the flavour of a memory is brought back to life, which, with all of its consequences, turns out to be still real: a succession of upsets, deceit, revelations with an almost detective-like feel to them. Three women knock at the door of the house where two sisters (Olimpia and Marta) have withdrawn into their ‘burrow’ several years since, to escape from a city where violence and the inability to communicate render relations between individuals ever more absurd. Gradually, through twists and sudden explosions of fear and suppressed rage, the mystery is unveiled: the sisters have been escaping the searingly painful memory of a rape committed almost as an act of ‘ideological revenge’ by the older sister’s boyfriend. But progressively, we sense that the victim, assisted by her three friends, went on to play executioner… What are the consequences? Is there really a child, inside the house where the three are unable to enter; or is it the weight of unburied pain, still there, real, in the flesh?… As Luigi Squarzina writes in the preface to the text, published by ‘Ricordi’: “This play has the great merit of putting on trial in private the appalling consequences of an historic act of violence. (…) A trial which a State, governments, compromised powers, find hard to undertake in an objectively credible way, but which is demanded by its subjectivity as being now unavoidable, like a unique path from psuedo-machiavellian cynicism to an ordinary feeling of charity, from desperation to hope without adjectives. It is in the narrow spotlight of this hope that we must recognise in Bassetti’s play an effective poetic strand which is entirely personal, beyond all the threat or rhetoric of collective autobiography”. A profound reflection on the condition of existence and on the sense which we are searching within it.