Circular – Strada Circolare

Locked in a neurotic struggle with everything and everyone around her, an anonymous young woman accompanies her aunt to a nursing home. Just like Christian from The Pilgrim’s Progress, she's tempted and teased along the way by friends and lovers trying to lead her astray. And like Christian she’s not always sure how to proceed; sometimes the pressure of social expectation is too overwhelming, the feeling of inadequacy too intense, and things keep getting harder thanks to the demands of her melancholic relative.

What makes this new writing from Anna Carfora pretty special is the neat way it discusses the pressures of modernity through an airy idiom that encompasses 500 years of theatrical tradition. Moments of intense physicality evoking the masked figures of commedia dell’arte give way to sequences of frenetic motion and diatribes about the human condition that could be lifted from a Calvino story. The audience is confronted with theatrical spectacle that seeks to destabilise our perceptions of generational conflict through a disquieting back-and-forth between the voice of a woman on the edge of death and a generation of self-centred hedonists out to corrupt her niece.

That’s not to say this production is perfectly formed. Transitions between some of the play’s dreamy segments are clunky, and a sequence centring on the protagonist’s desire to get her legs shaved falls flat. But the acting is persuasive—especially from lead women Carfora and Elena Mazzon as the aunt—and moments of intense psychological torment throw an energy around the room that highlights the dilemmas caused by dysfunctional personal relationships and the human tendency to look out for ourselves – themes as pertinent now as they were at the beginning of the 20th century.