Compagnia Scimone-Sframeli,
Messina

THE ENVELOPE

There’s been a lot of talk of Pinter, which then moved on to talk of Beckett, but perhaps before finally arriving at the conclusion that Spiro Scimone is just Spiro Scimone, or at a push Scimone and Sframeli, Kafka should undoubtedly be added to the equation, and not only for his obvious role as the forerunner of the two previously mentioned Nobel prize winners. The Castle is in fact strongly present at the beginning of The Envelope, a dramatic piece which begins with a character significantly referred to as “a man” entering a room containing just an empty chair, a cupboard and a few steps leading up a long stairway, asking to speak to The Chairman and addressing himself to a Secretary who is busy looking at his own reflection in the mirror, putting his glasses on to assert his authority. Why does this man wish to speak to the authorities? Because apparently he’s received “an envelope” requesting his presence, but without realizing that the implicit in his receipt of this envelope is a possible accusation, and it therefore lays him open to suspicion in the current context. From the very beginning the aforementioned man throws himself headlong into his role as the “accused” and therefore guilty man, tolerating, albeit impatiently, the ritual of repetitive questions to which he is submitted, with the objective of doubting his good faith in attributing to himself not only a name, but also the very face which figures on the identity document constituting the proof of his existence: a face which will have to be minutely checked in the mirror, while it is being insinuated that this visual recognition could be invalidated by an eventual twin identity and the suspect is tormented by the temptation to exchange his face with that of a “tough guy”. After all this is a place where there are no Kafkian-style female intermediaries and all characters are nameless and referred to only by their professional role – along with the Secretary there emerges the figure of the Cook, who appears to be wise to the ways of the world – or defined by their faces: there is a talk of a man on the loose with a “suspicious looking face” who should be beaten up and disabled immediately to “prevent him from committing a crime”. There is also a talk of a mysterious Mister X who lives in a cupboard and eats from a dogs bowl claiming to have once been a dancer, while a fervent search seems to be going on for a “real man” and there are the intermittent screeches of an alarm clock to mark the beginning and end of phantom “democracy lessons”, which perfectly fit into the context of a Secretary who proudly brandishes his truncheon, declares enthusiastically that he loves it and even sleeps with it, and whenever possible inserts it into suspects’ posteriors. This leads us into the last part of the play, written entirely in Italian, where for the first time in Scimone’s work violence is expressed openly – violence previously merely hinted at in Nunzio; violence that remained behind the scenes in the Bar and The Party, and was only implicit as foreshadowing of desolation in The Courtyard. It’s enough to witness the figure of the Chairman to have this unreal world (at any rate leaning toward paradox, and up to this point scattered with gags) transformed into a setting drenched in horror and to be looked upon in disgust: the passer-by is found guilty of a murder never committed, incriminated without evidence, beaten up and knocked around with the head with a truncheon, forced into making a false confession, finally killed, his body then hung from a hook and actually eaten by the horrific exponents of the authorities, accompanied by shots of whisky and group photos. What is really striking is the grinning and decadent image of power which unfortunately goes beyond fantasy and becomes a caricatured representation of dictatorship deeply rooted in the images of certain inflated leaders on the world stage, all hidden behind a greasy smile that we could easily recognize on many well-known faces.