Partner: PAV
Play: 30 Milligrammi di Ulipristal
Playwright: Benedetta Pigoni
Translation session with: Margherita Laera (from Italian to English)
Meetings: 9-14 December 2024 at Fondazione Teatro di Roma
Reading: 14th December 2024 at Teatro India, Rome
Director: Paola Rota
Cast: Actress and assistant director Martina Massaro, actor Saverio Barbiero, and actors from Teatro di Roma’s school Andrea Basile, Iulia Bonagura, Giuliano Bruzzese, Giacomo Cremaschi, Anna Dall’Olio, Aurora Di Modugno, Diamara Ferrero, Lorenzo Fochesato, Marzia Furlan, Eleonora Lausdei, Niccolò Massi, Elena Orsini, Francesca Piccolo, Nathalie Podbielski, Gilda Rinaldi Bertanza, Edoardo Rivoira, Carolina Sisto, Giulia Sucapane, Claudia Tortora, and Elisa Zucchetti.
Playground for New Voices offers nine emerging playwrights, who participated in the Fabulamundi programme, the opportunity to develop their scripts through professional sessions with translators, directors, and performers.
The partnership will organize nine R&D workshops to provide these early-career writers with perspectives on writing with an international mindset, considering translation from the outset. The workshopped texts will then be presented to audiences as readings.
Following the programme’s kick-off at Sala Beckett, PAV will invite Italian director Paola Rota to further develop 30 Milligrammi di Ulipristal, a play by Italian playwright Benedetta Pigoni. From December 9–14, 2024, in collaboration with Fondazione Teatro di Roma, the director, together with Benedetta Pigoni, actress and assistant director Martina Massaro, actor Saverio Barbiero, and actors from Teatro di Roma’s school, will explore the script’s stage potential.
Additionally, Benedetta Pigoni will meet with translator Margherita Laera to discuss broader issues of translation and adaptation between different cultural contexts.
On December 14, at Teatro India in Rome, the text developed during the workshop will be presented to the audience as a reading.
30 milligrammi di Ulipristal
Sofia wakes up with the feeling that something terrible happened the night before. However, she does not remember what. If at first she does not heed that foreboding, over time she gains awareness and the pieces of the event come together revealing to her the truth: she has been sexually assaulted and the perpetrators are her three friends. The text is set the day after and six months after the rape and tells of the journey Sofia takes to confront her fears, guilt, and the idea of reporting it. The narrative comes to life through the online sites and apps that Sofia uses on her cell phone.
Benedetta Pigoni
Reggio Emilia, 2000. Playwright. Her educational background is characterized by the study of Oriental languages and cultures in the Languages, Markets, and Cultures of Asia program at Alma Mater Studiorum of Bologna. In 2021, she attended the advanced training course in puppet theater Animateria, promoted by Teatro Gioco Vita and Teatro del Drago. In 2023, she won the Tondelli Prize as part of the Riccione Prize with the play 30 Milligrams of Ulipristal. She is currently attending the Writing course at the Civica Scuola di Teatro Paolo Grassi.
When I read 30 milligrams of Ulipristal by Benedetta Pigoni, I was struck by the structure and openness of the piece, which offers countless opportunities for a director’s creativity. The piece could be seen as a choral piece – with multiple characters and performers animating the protagonist’s inner life – but would function just as well as a monologue, perhaps with offstage voices, projections and music. This flexibility is a great strength in terms of being able to adapt to different performing conditions and budget sizes.
The theme of rape is particularly challenging to stage, despite the fact that theatre history is packed full of on-stage violence against women. I love that the ‘act’ is never actually seen or shown by Pigoni – it would be a real shame to continue to give in to the voyeuristic pulsion of the male gaze that’s prevalent in Western theatre traditions, when this is precisely a play about empowering women. Spiking is a real, concrete and urgent issue that has been recently represented on stage and screen – most notably in Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, Richard Gadd’s Baby Reindeer, and also in Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde. But while these modern and contemporary examples place violence at the centre of the field of vision, Pigoni avoids the trap of reproducing it.
When I spoke to Benedetta, I stressed how, in my view, the best part of the play is the scene with the mosquito rap. The image of a scourge of mosquitoes attacking the rapist is a powerful metaphor for women’s agency – small, itchy, inconvenient, yet ultimately unbeatable. Mosquitoes are the ultimate ‘Kill-Joys’, like the feminist role model so aptly depicted by Sara Ahmed. The mosquitoes turn the protagonist from a victim into an explosion of active energy devoted to disturbing the patriarchal status quo.
30 milligrams of Ulipristal is a powerful play that will no doubt find its way on to international stages.
– Margherita Laera
