Capri

CAPRI - WYSPA UCIEKINIRÓW Genre: Contemporary theatre From 16 years old Running time of the show: 5h15 with interval In Polish, with French surtitles Perched on a cliff on Capri, the casa Malaparte was by turns a refuge, an artist's den, a voluntary prison – a crossroads of destinies, from Tiberius to Godard.

In this house-world, Krystian Lupa unfolds a haunted closed-room drama drawn from Kaputt and La Peau by Malaparte. Outside, war rumbles; inside, a séance summons the ghosts of the ideologues of the old Europe.

On a sheer cliff on Capri stands the casa Malaparte, a strange house built in 1937 by the Italian writer.

It extends a long history of exile on the island: before it, Tiberius's villa, then Axel Munthe's Casa San Michele; there passed Henry James, Rilke, Cocteau, Gorky, Lenin, Picasso, fugitives who came in search of asylum.

In 1963, Godard shot Le Mépris there, with Fritz Lang and Brigitte Bardot on the white terrace from which Ulysses was supposed to glimpse Ithaca. Refuge, artist's den, voluntary prison, archetype of the house: Capri is a crossroads of destinies.

It is this world-place that Krystian Lupa unfolds in Capri – L'Île des fugitifs, the magnum opus of a great visionary of the European stage, created in 2019 after Kaputt and La Peau by Curzio Malaparte.

An unclassifiable figure of the twentieth century, who went from fascism to communism, a hallucinated witness to the disasters of war, Malaparte mingles reportage and fable, cruelty and intimacy in his books.

His villa becomes here the sole setting of a haunted closed-room drama, where Tiberius crosses paths with Godard. Outside, a war rumbles whose number is unknown.

Lupa calls it 'the monster of Europe': the hubris of those who wanted to remake man and the world, and left behind nothing but ruins.