Roberto Scarpetti

New Voices focuses on creative workshops for a younger audience and it’s a pivotal moment for Fabulamundi, that aims to play a bigger role in the formation of a new generation of writers. For this reason it’s an honor, a responsibility, and also a challenge to be part of the Fab Community. I’m looking forward to confront myself with the other tutors, and to explore a way to open the national borders of playwriting, experiencing new languages, confronting the themes at the centre of the stories coming from all the countries of the program. And trying to put all this at the centre of Fabulamundi’s workshops.

Biography

Graduated in Screenwriting at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, he won the Mention Franco Quadri at Premio Riccione 2011, with the play Viva l’Italia, le morti di Fausto e Iaio, that was later produced by Teatro dell’Elfo. With this play, he also won the prize Franco Enriquez for best playwriting and received a nomination at Premio Le Maschere del Teatro Italiano. Viva l’Italia was aired in a French radiophonic version on France Culture, and in 2023 produced by RadioRai as a 6 episodes podcast.
Under the direction of Antonio Calbi, he was designed as resident playwright at Teatro di Roma. For Teatro di Roma, he wrote: Prima della bomba, for which he received a second nomination at Premio Le Maschere del Teatro Italiano; Ritratto di una capitale; Ritratto di una nazione, as dramaturg; 28 battiti, which he also directed. For Compagnia Lumen he wrote Falafel express and Samir, both produced by Campo Teatrale. For Compagnia del Sole he wrote Secondo Federico. Since 2019 he works with Lacasadargilla as playwright for the festival IF/Invasioni dal futuro. For the screen, he wrote Magic Island, Tra le onde, Dove non ho mai abitato, Summer Games and Quello che non sai di me. Summer Games was Switzerland’s choice for Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Film pre-selection in 2012 and it won the Swiss Film Prize for Best Screenplay. He has led several playwriting workshops, for PAV and for Lacasadargilla, and since 2022 he teaches playwriting at Scuola di Perfezionamento del Teatro di Roma.

Selected texts

Before the bomb

Characters: 5 men, 1 women – available in Italian
An underground carriage of a large Italian city, at peak time. Among the passengers, David is sweating, he is upset. In his backpack, a homemade bomb. He holds a light switch, connected to an electric wire, hidden inside the sleeve of the sweatshirt he wears. It is about to operate the detonator. But how did David get to the point of exploding? And for what reason? The bomb was prepared by him with two of his comrades, Karim and Rafiq. The first is an Italian converted to Islam, just like him. The second is an Afghan fundamentalist. They started talking when David, who as a Muslim has chosen to call himself Ibrahim, met Karim and his conversion turned toward a more radical, integralist belief. The ideological framing is very precise and propaganda seems to have taken on who, like David, thought he wanted to change the world. How many civilian casualties, men, women, and children are killed each day by US drone bombs? How many innocent Muslims die unnecessarily? It’s a new Shoah, with Muslims instead of Jews and with the West playing the role of the Nazis. That is why David, Karim and Rafiq feel they have to do something, feel they have to help their Muslim brothers in the name of Ummah, the Islamic nation. Yet this is not what David thought when he talked about changing the world. When he converted, David was looking for something else. He sought a sense of belonging, something to feel involved with, a new purpose that would help him out of a period of profound personal crisis. And he had found it in Islam, he had found it in friends met at the mosque, Ahmed and Jusuf, who had taught him to pray, who had opened the door to the understanding of Islam and its thousands rules. And as a true new family, as he was coming from the source, Ahmed and Jussuf had also tried to explain to Davide the many deviations of integrity.

28 Heartbeats

Characters: 1 man – available in Italian
Giuseppe won the Olympics. And he destroyed his life: with doping.
He used doping. To win again? To stay strong? To continue to have the success he was used to? Not to disappoint the fans?
In an intimate confession to the doctor who certifies his positivity, Giuseppe opens to the truth. A truth that digs in his dreams, his needs, in hate and in the love he has always felt for his sport.
A self-destructive and creative truth. Because for Giuseppe, doping is the only chance to be himself, bluntly refusing everything he never wanted. He never asked for.
A truth that pulsates in the beats of his heart, flowing in his blood. That changes and shapes his body. Like sports.

East Rome (accidental death of a nurse)
A quarrel over petty things. The fight between a Roman woman and a Rumanian boy. Insults and impulsive reactions. A tense confrontation, like so many other in Rome’s daily life, when one gives way to anger for the slightest thing – traffic, a push in a crowded bus or a glimpse too many. This time the boy does not stop at insulting and goes past the boundaries of respect and human society altogether.

Viva l’Italia (Le morti di Fausto e Iaio) Hooray for Italy (The Deaths of Fausto and Iaio)
May the 18th, 1978. Two days have passed since the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, president of the Christian Democrats by the Red Brigades, but this story of Italy’s Anni di Piombo doesn’t take place in Rome, it takes place in Milan.
At 8 o’clock on a Saturday evening like any other, two teenagers, Fausto and Iaio are shot dead by three men up in Milan from Rome. Fausto and Iaio are killed and Viva l’Italia follows those who survive them: Angela, Iaio’s mother, Giorgio, one of the killers, Salvo, the policeman in charge of the investigation, and Mauro, a journalist who starts his own investigation.