The debut of the show “Eduardo, let’s face it,” written by Claudio Proietti and directed by Giancarlo Sammartano, is approaching. Inviting you to the Villa Lazzaroni Theatre to see it, we spoke with the director of the work.
Giancarlo, how did your collaboration with the playwright and writer Claudio Proietti, who is also a director, start?
Unfortunately, I met Claudio Proietti just recently, on the occasion of this show. We understood each other quickly. I appreciate his smart, better said, right, capacity for invention, a dry, theatrical language. He is so generous in accepting that, on the way from the page to the stage, something gets lost but much gets found. And this is only possible if a writer knows the Theater, its trap, its gesture, its silence. We are all stagehands or, to say it with Ronald Harwood, the dressers.
You have staged theater in an infinite number of languages, cultures, and eras. Who is Eduardo De Filippo for you, and how do you stage his plays?
Eduardo has always been the focus of the theater I love. I read everything of his—”La cantata dei giorni pari e di quelli dispari” (“The Cantata of odd and even days”) —at twenty. His theater keeps the memory of untepeatable characters, pain of living, tears to be hidden and laugh to be shared. His total identity stays between life and theater. Theatre is a part of life. What a great, wonderful, and ordered confusion.
In your opinion, what do Eduardo De Filippo’s theater and ancient theater have in common?
Apparently, nothing. And yet, they share the root of man, that is, man himself. From the ancient epochs to the everyday life there is one step. The great characters of Attic tragedy speak of a shattered order, of a lost happiness (Aristotle writes this in his “Poetics”) and of the mortal battle to win it back. Great ideas travel beneath different disguises.
You are the artistic director of the Villa Lazzaroni Theatre in Rome. What are the principles by which you select shows for this theater’s repertoire?
They are very smple: no TV cast-offs, just real actors, authors, directors of Theater. History, society, custom. No cheap psychologizing; one’s own navel is not the center of the world.
How does “Eduardo, let’s face it” fit into the 2025-2026 season repertoire?
It fits like a glove. It plays a king’s role. Telling the Past, but not gone, and the Present of an extraordinary actor, Nicola Acunzo, it is a surprisingly human show, aristocratic in its elegance, popular, but never Pop. It is dedicated to everyone who tonight performes the revolutionary act of turning off the television and going out.
What cast and stage life will the show “Eduardo, let’s face it” have? Why, in your opinion, should the audience see this show?
I have no power over this, only reasoned hopes. It is an emotionally powerful show that does not peddle emotions but conveys feelings, tells how the fiction of Theater can be truer than reality. You enter the theater sullen and leave it seeking for more. I think the show will have a long life. It has no additives, it has no expiration date.
Being an acting coach, would you use this play as a training project for young actors starting their careers?
This is exactly a show for young people! In age and in spirit. The male and female students of the Actor’s School of “Fondamenta” (the group that runs the Villa Lazzaroni Theatre) will all be invited, but certainly not forced to join. They will have to realize on their own that “de te fabula narratur.” (the story is about them).
Would you bring this play by Claudio Proietti to the radio if you had the opportunity?
Unfortunately, Radio—which I’m passionate about! In the eighties and nineties I must have directed about fifty productions for it—could not render with voice alone the splitting of the character of the humble leading actor Raffaele La Pena facing the authoritative ghost of Eduardo De Filippo. But who knows.
You were assistant director to directors who are now legends of Italian theater: Vito Pandolfi, Sergio Tofano, Mario Ferrero, Luigi Squarzina. Is there any teaching from them that came back to you while staging the show based on Claudio Proietti’s play?
All of these great director I was assistant to, taught me without saying it, without explaining it, that directing has to do with the vision of a future that does not yet exist. You must have the show in your head and gently push, even with apparent recklessness, all the matters of which the show will be made, shaping them into a single organic form. It’s about making reason and rhythm coexist.
What will your next direction be?
An adaptation of a wonderful story by Marina Cvetaeva, “Sonecka.” With Giorgia Trasselli as a leading actress. Different chapters of the thousand and one nights at the theater.
We wish the director many new shows to stage and invite our readers to see “Eduardo, let’s face it” from May 15th to 17th at the Villa Lazzaroni Theatre in Rome.
Olga Matsyna
