Shows /
La Morteane
Part dal Fantat
Compagnia Arearea/Teatri Stabil Furlan
2022
from a lost text by Pier Paolo Pasolini
“Of theatre I have written a one-act play, ‘La Morteana’ (the title is taken from a verse by Colloredo)…”
Thus wrote Pier Paolo Pasolini to Gianfranco D’Aronco from Versuta on 29 November 1945.
Pasolini was twenty-three years old, living through that extraordinary Friulian season which would be abruptly interrupted only four years later, with his flight to Rome, opening a new chapter in his life and poetics.
La Morteana was intended (so Pasolini writes in the same letter to D’Aronco) to be performed shortly thereafter by the small company of the Academiuta, which Pasolini himself directed.
But this never happened, and the reasons for this failure remain unknown.
Indeed, unlike the contemporary I Turcs tal Friul, which has come down to us, nothing more was ever heard of La Morteana — until the chance discovery of a portion of the script, specifically the Part dal Fantat, which emerged from a desk drawer many years later.
The recovered manuscript contains only the lines that were to be spoken by what can be deduced as the play’s protagonist,
a circumstance consistent with Pasolini’s habit of giving each actor not the complete text, but only their own part in the work to be performed.
The play, in jesting tones and making room for the popular voice, thus deals with themes of considerable weight, such as the clash between good and evil,
moral questions, the need to earn one’s place in heaven already during life by avoiding abuses and excesses — such as, for instance, a good drunken binge at the village festival with friends.
Il Fantat, a young proletarian belonging to the large ranks of young ‘Pasolinian’ figures — first Friulian, later Roman — gives voice to the rural proletariat of the war years: without work, with empty pockets, yet with extraordinary exuberance and an unstoppable desire for life and the humble, popular enjoyment of the village fair.
Once the dream/nightmare has run its course, he finally decides to end the night with a good sleep, postponing any analysis of its lessons and any possible change of life until he wakes the next morning.
