A Journey of Theatrical Translation from Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels: From Fanny & Alexander's No Awkward Questions on Their Part to Story of a Friendship (Including an Interview with Chiara Lagani)

This paper—a reworking of part of my MA thesis at the Università per Stranieri di Siena—is divided into two parts. In the first I introduce Chiara Lagani, along with her encounter with Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels and the poetic inspirations resulting from it. I go on to analyze the profound correspondence between the tetralogy and the theatrical aims of Fanny & Alexander, the company that Lagani founded with Luigi De Angelis. I also reconstruct the phases of the theatrical transposition by means of which Lagani and Fanny & Alexander created and staged the tetralogy, with references to the critical writings on the plays. In this first part I have also made use of unpublished material that Lagani and De Angelis generously allowed me to consult and quote, including their dramaturgic and directing notes regarding the tetralogy and its penetrating symbolism. The second part is devoted entirely to an interview with Chiara Lagani, in which the playwright discusses the crucial intersection of the tetralogy and her theatrical rewriting of it with the global imagination. The interview has its origins in my experience of seeing Story of a Friendship, Fanny & Alexander's Ferrante production, at the Teatro Comunale Laura Betti di Casalecchio di Reno; in a meeting I had with Chiara Lagani in Florence; and in a long, ongoing correspondence with her. The perspective that inspired me in organizing and composing my questions was the anthropological meaning of the doll in contemporary female subjectivities.

Part One: From No Awkward Questions on Their Part to Story of a Friendship

During the summer of 2015, the playwright and actress Chiara Lagani read Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels and fell in love with them. After a period of reflection that lasted a year, Lagani was inspired by this powerful experience to translate the nearly two thousand pages of the tetralogy into a one-act play (No Awkward Questions on Their Part) and a three-act play (Story of a Friendship), which—starting in 2017—she brought to the stage with her company, Fanny & Alexander. This experimental theater group, founded in Ravenna in 1992 by Lagani and Luigi De Angelis, is one of the best known on the Italian scene. Lagani's elective affinity with Ferrante's storytelling lies first of all in the novel's archetype of childhood, created by the scene in which the dolls are tossed through the grate, their disappearance, and the bold, failed attempt to retrieve them. During the nearly twenty-five years of its existence, Fanny & Alexander had conceived of theatrical activity as a way of returning to a child's gaze, to the point of view that can endow the fiction of the game with truth. As Lagani explains in the interview in the second part of this paper, the game—play—is a probe by means of which children capture the deep emotions of mystery, fear, and death and translate them into creative language. During the company's performances, this plunge into primary emotions is skillfully rendered by an original scenic process, achieved by a method called eterodirezione ("heterodirection"). Tried out initially almost by chance (Mazzei), eterodirezione, which has been used by Fanny & Alexander for more than ten years now, consists in having the performer receive the directions for his or her part in the scene through an earpiece. Thus the performer comes onstage not with a memorized text and a fixed script but with an ear monitor through which he or she receives gestural and verbal directions (sometimes pre-recorded—as in the case of the theatrical translations of Ferrante—and sometimes transmitted live) and performs them live, thus allowing each performance of a show to be different. The ear monitor produces a sort of instantaneous composition within the body of the actress or actor (Valentini), who lets her- or himself be invaded by the words and sinks into the "emotional quality of the actions...