La Divina Commedia sulla scena contemporanea: Trittico dantesco di Fabrizio Arcuri

The visualising force of the Divine Comedy has long acted on the theatrical imagination, fuelling a wide range of Dantean performances that from the 19th century to the present day has known no let-up. In the variegated horizon of this spectacular phenomenology stands out the recent project Trittico Dantesco directed by the Roman director Fabrizio Arcuri and produced by Teatro Stabile del Veneto, which debuted in Padua in May 2021. In this trilogy the otherworldly journey of the poet is maintained at a structural level but, through the rewritings of three young playwrights – Fausto Paravidino for Un inferno, Letizia Russo for Un purgatorio and Fabrizio Sinisi for Un paradiso – Dante’s opera is profoundly actualised. Adopting the methodological filter offered by postdramatic theatre (H-T Lehmann), the essay aims to reconstruct the strategy of «transcodification» (L. Hutcheon) of the Comedy in the performances staged by Arcuri, taking into account the specific functions of the dramaturgical rewriting, and the unprecedented spectacular architecture placed in the present time.