Saint-Ecstasy

The story of the Atreides is the story of a line cursed by the original sin of a father—Tantalus, mortal son of Zeus—who decided to feed his son to the gods. Personally condemned to eternal torture, he saw his descendants irreversibly punished as well. For four generations, and until the judgement of Orestes, took place a succession of murders, parricides, infanticides, rapes, and incestuous relationships… And every name in that violence-ridden family—Iphigenia, Helen, Agamemnon, Electra, etc.—has become, thanks to the genius of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, a tragic, mythical, and classic hero. Antonio Latella’s incredible project was to offer eight of those stories to seven young writers so that they could revisit them for a new generation of actors to perform. Within what became Santa Estasi, an epic spectacle lasting sixteen hours and split into two parts, the Italian director admits having established two basic guidelines. An intellectual equation: to talk about family within a society that makes rules impossible; coupled with the reality he experiences with these young artists: to work on the figure of the father and on the concrete reality of tradition, heritage, and transmission. A project which, according to the new director of the Venice Biennale theatre, says “clearly that we have to free ourselves from our elders’ responsibility to find ours and exist.”

Antonio Latella was born in the region of Naples in 1967 to a family of workers exiled to Turin. He left college at 17 and trained at the Teatro Stabile before joining the Bottega Teatrale school, founded in Florence by Vittorio Gassman. At the age of 22 he started playing for the most prestigious Italian directors of the 1980s, such as Pippo Di Marca, Luca Ronconi, Massimo Castri, or Tito Piscitelli. In 1997, he directed his first show, Marguerite Duras’s Agatha. From then on he focused exclusively on his own projects, all marked by a meticulous exploration of the worlds of the authors whose work he adapted: Jean Genet, Christopher Marlowe, Samuel Beckett… In 2001, he won the Ubu Prize for Shakespeare and Beyond, a series of reinterpretations of Othello (1999), Macbeth (2000), Romeo and Juliet (2000), and Hamlet (2001). His shows are physical, almost carnal, and focus particularly on family, revisiting the great verbal tradition of Italian theatre. A key figure in the resurgence of Italian theatre, he was recently appointed director of the Venice Biennal Theatre Festival.