MADRE E ASSASSINA
(MOTHER AND MURDERER)

“Madre e Assassina” (Mother and Murderer) tells the story of a more than normal woman, Maddalena Sacer, who one morning kills her two children.
“Madre e Assassina” tells the story of a more than formal theatre project by a group of artists, Teatrino Clandestino, who one evening kill the actors and replace them onstage with their ghosts.
We choose a subject because we find it fits the way we are, because we understand it; putting this subject on the stage means, therefore, expressing something of ourselves which is true at that precise moment.
But we can also choose a subject because it is as far away as it is possible to be from the way we are. In this case we are putting a question mark on the stage, a riddle we are trying to solve and want to share. The performance thus becomes a way of posing the question in communion, is the form in which the question will be presented, not just to the audience but also to the entire community present at the time in the theatre building, the audience, artists, ushers, stage-hands, lighting technicians, administrative staff, theatre organisation etc., and the form in which the question is put is the stuff of the play. The two things influence each other; the playwriting penetrates the question, giving it an organic form, and the question penetrates the playwriting, leaving a mark in its genetics.
“Madre e Assassina” belongs to the second type of choice. It has its origins in something which is a long way from our experience, which interests us therefore, has a mysterious attraction, being so alien and, in the specific case of infanticide, so inexplicable and terrifying.
Everything that is extraneous, however, attracts us by virtue of the remote cord that connects us to it, that calls us to it like the bucket at the bottom of a well. Following the rope, we enter another dimension, but only if we follow it downwards, because if we drew up the rope we would find no more than an ordinary bucket, devoid of any interest once struck by sunlight. That’s why we couldn’t reconstruct Maddalena Sacer’s story by pulling up the bucket but only by going down into the darkness at the bottom of the well. It’s a story that emerges from the darkness, that darkness in which you can see everything, but through different eyes, where your eyes turn their gaze inwards, looking at the world within and not the world outside. It is the cinema of the unconscious, inhabited by larvae, transfigured human beings. “Madre e Assassina” is a veritable ghost-dance in which we see a choreography of bodies being skinned alive, and then dematerialising. What we are witnessing in Mother and Murderer is Theatre in its pure form, disembodied from its material, demonstrating that certain axioms, certain truths about the art of theatre, have definitively collapsed; though they can still be of use, they no longer constitute the only, single truth. Today, the theatre has evolved to a more complex state but a state which is not well-mannered. Both in Mother and Murderer and in the entire project which led up to it - murderous mothers – there is a formal shift which shows to what extent the concept of image, which has colonised, as it were, the concept of presence, can be led back to the condition of presence once more; this process had already taken place some time previously, suggested by the larval imagination, but as such (i.e. imaginary) merely talked about, alluded to, looked admiringly at this presence. Now it is with us - true presence, that is - anthropomorphic images, not human beings in flesh and blood, that rattle the workings of the most ghostlike of machines ever invented – The Theatre. And it is here that we manage to capture in a kind of distillate, or rather a cast removed from its mould, that elusive stage-presence which is (were it possible) the soul’s photograph.
What has been denied us by the cult of the visual image is restored to us by the theatre, which uses its one, great rule - that of the here and now – only transfigured, GHOST.