Rarely have I spent such an intense ninety minutes watching a show, as I did the other evening at Milan’s Franco Parenti theatre. From start to finish French dramatist Nicolas Bedos’s Le voyage di Victor (Il viaggio di Victor, Italian title, translation Monica Capuani) grabbed my imagination. Bedos’s gripping theatrical thriller, which premiered in Paris in 2009, was staged by the celebrated, internationally acclaimed, opera director David Livermore, and produced by the National Theatres of Genova and Naples. The set, created by Livermore and Lorenzo Russo Rainaldi, thanks to video projections, covering the entire back wall and floor of the stage, slickly changes with each short scene, creating both states of mind and realistic places. Bedos’s subject is the tantalising one of memory, or rather loss of memory, and a search for lost identity. The play opens when Victor (Antonio Zavatteri) has just had a road accident – we witness the impact of the accident as the video projection, showing water, splinters into a million tiny shards and a lifeless body can be seen on the road. Following a coma, the middle-aged Victor is left with total amnesia. On a bare stage, except for two stools and a trunk, in semi-darkness, Victor meets Marion (Linda Gennari), who having witnessed the accident, is deeply concerned about him. Marion’s identity remains intriguingly unclear for much of the action. Is she a nurse, or a psychologist, perhaps? Whoever she is, she fires questions at him about his past, leaving Victor stumbling, moaning and growing angry, unable to remember even the most basic things. In one scene, the video projections conjure up the cityscape of the Beaubourg area of Paris, where Victor has always lived. It’s here that he meets a string of friends and acquaintances who unknowingly give him hints about who he is, making him laugh and cry, as he wonders if they are telling the truth. Through Victor’s dilemma, Bedos delves into how fragile our identity is, and how, after such a trauma, in a bid to rebuild a sense of self, an individual is dependent on others (in Victor’s case, Marion), but also on some hard-to-define inner drive; Victor pointedly confides to Marion, “My instinct is all I have.” We are also treated to some startling twists in the story, such as when Marion unveils that she is Victor’s former partner and the mother of his son, whom we later find out was driving the car and has died in the accident. This revelation is beautifully achieved, through a split dialogue; Marion begins talking about her son, but Victor fails, or can’t bring himself, to listen, remarking that he, too, has a son, and that he feels terribly sorry she has lost hers. It is in this scene that the focus moves to Marion, who from the beginning has done her utmost to help Victor remember, sometimes countering his anger and frustration, sometimes accusing him of pretending to have lost his memory. We now see how brave the woman actually is, namely a bereaved mother, whose ex-husband and the father of her son is unable to empathise and mourn their son’s death. In a final scene, a projection conjures up a bedroom, where the two are lying in bed, with an image of the son between them, underscoring that the accident which Victor has had and his subsequent amnesia, impacts not only on him but on a mother and an adolescent. The performances by Linda Gennari and Antonio Zavatteri sensitively interpret the many facets of these two characters through the dialogue, while also giving voice to many unspoken emotions, through a beautifully choreographed scene of theatre dance. David Livermore’s production achieves an almost perfect harmony among the different theatre languages, never allowing the visual projections to prevail over the actor’s bodies, as sometimes happens. The theme of this year’s season at the Franco Parenti theatre is “What if we start talking about love again?”; this two-hander, which ran from 4 to 9 February, couldn’t be more appropriate.
Linda Gennari and Antonio Zavatteri in Il viaggio di Victor at Franco Parenti theatre, directed by Davide Livermore, translated by Monica Capuani. Photo credit: Federico Pitto.
Il viaggio di Victor
by Nicolas Bedos
translation Monica Capuani
direction Davide Livermore
with Linda Gennari and Antonio Zavatteri
and with Diego Cerami in video
costume Giorgio Armani
set Davide Livermore and Lorenzo Russo Rainaldi
sound design Edoardo Ambrosio
lighting design Aldo Mantovani
video maker D-Wok
Teatro Parenti, 4-9 February 2025
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Margaret Rose.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
