Translated automatically by AI from the Italian original.
MELILLI – Great anticipation for the debut of Pippo Pattavina in “The game of roles”, Luigi Pirandello’s celebrated masterpiece, which will take the stage on Sunday 8 November at 5.30pm at the Città della Notte theatre (Strada Provinciale 3, Bivio Augusta – Contrada Campana, Melilli). The play, reimagined for the stage under the direction of Giampaolo Romania, features a standout cast from the Sicilian and national theatre scene: alongside Pattavina, the actress Emanuela Muni will perform, together with Riccardo Maria Tarci, Giuseppe Ferlito, Aldo Toscano, Santo Santonocito, Elisa Franco, Giuseppe Parisi and Giovanni Maugeri.
The production features sets designed by Salvo Manciagli, costumes by Sartoria Pipi of Palermo with seamstress Isabella Sturniolo, stage management by Franco Sardo, and lighting and sound design by Santi Rapisarda.
The stage design and the plot
Pirandello’s work explores the complex arc of Leone Gala, a man who chooses to shield himself from the pain of existence by draining his emotions and turning his intellect into a form of pure rational abstraction. Around him revolves his wife Silia, trapped by others’ judgment and longing to break free from her husband’s paralysing presence.
Silia’s attempt to rid herself of Leone through the misunderstanding of a supposed insult backfires into a trap: Leone accepts the formal “role” of the wronged husband, challenging his rival to a duel, only to reverse the mechanism and force Silia’s lover, Guido Venanzi, to suffer the dramatic real-life consequences.
Director Giampaolo Romania’s notes
In his director’s notes, Giampaolo Romania describes the work as a journey into a true “geometry of passions”, where the stage space becomes a visual metaphor for inner division:
“Staging The game of roles means entering a living, fragmented structure. For Leone Gala, to live is to observe life from the outside, reducing existence to an immovable pivot around which the forms and conventions of society revolve like empty eggshells. The stage design embodies the constant Pirandellian dialectic between the ‘fullness’ of feeling and the ‘emptiness’ of reason. The everyday environment ceases to be a reassuring place and instead becomes a representation of a mind that analyses and isolates: an inescapable mechanism in which the characters become pawns on an invisible chessboard, locked in a deadly duel where abstraction is tragically consumed by the flesh of reality.”
