Pubblicato 2021-03-12
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Abstract
The essay reconstructs Orazio Costa’s direction of Il quinto evangelista by Mario Pomilio. The drama is included by the author in the final chapter of the award-winning novel Il quinto evangelio and staged during the 29th Festa del Dramma Popolare di San Miniato (September 1975), a few months after the publication but, after a short tour, never represented. The novel had the same lot: after eighteen editions and translations in many languages it was re-published only in 2015. Through unpublished Costa’s autobiographical pages and press, it will be examined the ideological reasons why the show was cancelled. The play was written by the «new Manzoni» and directed by Costa in contrast to the New Theatre, restoring the phonetic and semantic meaning of the ‘word’. The director imagined the theatrical structure similar to a television series and transformed Pomilio’s sacred drama in a theatrical play about the Resistance: Orazio Costa, as with the author, made a fundamental thinking about the persistent ‘silence of God’ in front of 20th century historical traumas. The author republished the original text but not the script for the actors, to declare the distance between the novel writer and the playwriter.