CARLENTINI – On April 14, 2023, the theatrical season of Carlentini “Turi Ferro” ends, with a comedy of great significance and great performers, such as the protagonist Lunetta Savino. It is “The Mother” by the French Florian Zeller and directed by Marcello Cotugno and assistant director Arianna Cremona. Among the interpreters we find Paolo Zuccari, Niccolò Ferrero and Chiarastella Sorrentino. The sets are by Luigi Ferrigno, the lights by Pietro Sperduti and the costumes by Alessandra Benaduce, the photos by Riccardo Bagnoli, the artistic direction by Alfio Breci.
It is a “Compagnia Molière production”, in co-production with the “Teatro di Napoli” and the “Accademia Perduta Romagna Teatri”.
The theme addressed by Florian Zeller in this comedy represents a piece of psycho-pedagogical literature of great importance: the morbid relationship between mother and child. Through the theatrical “manifesto”, the theme of motherhood passes from literary texts to theaters, provoking an internal and inevitable debate between the spectator and the protagonist.
But really, can a relationship between mother and child be so destructive?
Can the love between a mother and a son really turn into a toxic relationship?
Zeller, supported by the pedagogical literature, makes us understand that everything is in the hands of the mother, and depends on her intelligence and her awareness of the fact that the son is an individual in his own right and as such, will live an independent life, under a another roof, tied to another person, as it should be.
Motherhood means giving the gift of life to a human being, loving him right away, raising him and making him live his dreams, without bringing into play the possessive part of being a mother. Loving does not mean selfishness.
Anna experienced the detachment from her son in a painful and destructive way, she did not acquire that awareness of not being a mother and mistress. She has never questioned herself, but others. She never wondered where she was wrong her attention was only focused on how much she worked, how much she sacrificed, how much she gave up for others, what she could have done and didn’t do. Zeller points out that Anna chose to give up her life, evidently she didn’t love her husband who then cheated on her, she wasn’t ready to be a mother, but she chose a path without passions, without interests that went beyond the his reality made up of mother and wife. At a time when she was a long-distance mother and a cheated-on wife, she found no strength to continue giving meaning to her day. Until, she became a prisoner of her own thoughts, without realizing it. Her vision is narrow, beyond it she sees only herself, she can’t see the possibility that her son can be happy, even away from her.
“The Mother” refused to find “other ways”, other alternatives besides that of possessive motherhood, and Zeller’s text underlines all the pathological aspects. Anna repeats herself in different narrative levels, reproduces her existence in a sort of “Multiverse”, perhaps to understand “who knows how it would have been?”
The repetition of these alternating realities are always linked by a single common thread, which is metaphorically represented by the thread of the red ball that Anna collects with her hands. Maybe because he wants to keep running the strings of other people’s lives? Zeller teaches us that we cannot expect to dominate the lives and choices of others.
The son, Niccolò Ferrero, will come out destroyed by this toxic relationship, to the point of corrupting his soul with the idea of murder.
The son’s girlfriend, played by Chiarastella Sorrentino, is the one who took the son away. It represents everything that is not the mother: it is lightheartedness, love, freedom, youth and the future. But, suddenly, women occupying two poles apart roles,
they show up in the same red dress to create a parallelism between the two figures, as Anna too was once young, beautiful, charming and passionate, but now she preferred to destroy herself.
The much appreciated scenography by Luigi Ferrigno, with the five doors, a refrigerator, three chairs and a table, essential like the scenes by Samuel Beckett, help to build the repetitiveness of the obsessive power of the mother’s pathological game.
Do the game of mirrors and the people reflected suggest the idea of a “fluid society” in which Anna and her dimension are probably unable to adapt?
In the end Zeller leads us to the following reflection:
The responsibility for the mother’s loneliness lies in having given up on life, canceling her dreams, her hopes and her desires, solely to devote herself to her own son on whom she has poured all her frustrations, her remorse and her ideals of Love. He also rejected the presence of his daughter, who is not seen on stage, precisely because she has never had any role or weight in Anna’s life.
All this is a path that leads dangerously to despair and so, Anna creates a reality of her own, truly critical, a little dreamlike and surreal, stuck in the thick tangle of the skein of her own thoughts.
If he doesn’t decide to change his attitude, he will hardly get out of it.
Therefore, Zeller wants to say to all mothers, and I would add to all parents, in their relationship with all their children: “Be loving, but remember that loving does not mean being selfish. Be smart.”
