I started writing for theatre for simplicity, having known it on stage as an actress. This means not to trust so much the written word, but silences and actions that are generated on the scene, in the space between the words. I do not have, when I start writing, a strong self-supporting idea, a paradigm, but I look for something as simple as possible. I write to open small cracks in the smooth reality in order to break it and, at times, to allow people to observe it from a point of view different than ordinary. I do not have a unique method. I do not have preordained schemes, I do not believe in the unity of time and place, nor that in the third act there must be a crisis, or that the acts must necessarily be five. I would like my theatre to be poetic. A kind of act of love for human smallness, for its inadequacy to the enormous measure of life, and death.
Born in Turin in 1968, Valentina Diana graduated in Acting at the Paolo Grassi School of Dramatic Arts in 1997 and worked for many years as an actress with important directors as Marco Baliani, Isabelle Pousseur, Elio De Capitani, Renato Gabrielli, Giorgio Barberio Corsetti, Francois Kahn, Alfonso Santagata, Gabriele Vacis, Denise Marleau, Thierry Salmon. Since 2001 she has dedicated herself to playwriting.
In February 2008, she founded, together with Lorenzo Fontana, Compagnia 15 Febbraio, that gave light to several productions, some of them in collaboration with Berlin film director Claudia Hamm and others with French theaters. Since 2012, she has been increasingly involved in theatrical writing and prose.
She works closely with Compagnia Principio Attivo Teatro based in Lecce, as an author and dramaturg. Among her plays we find Fratelli (directed by Lorenzo Fontana, with Andrea Collavino and Beatrice Schiros, producted by Sistema Teatro Torino), Ricordati di ricordare cosa? (National Award for Playwriting 2009 “Il centro del discorso”), La bicicletta rossa (Eolo Awards 2013 for playwriting), Senza Voce – Storia di Ciccilla briganta (directed by Silvia Lodi, producted by Principio Attivo Teatro, Lecce), La palestra della felicità (published by Cue Press, with the direction of Elena Russo Arman, a production of Teatro dell’Elfo in Milan). Opera Nazionale Combattenti presenta i Giganti della montagna atto III (with the direction of Giuseppe Semerararo, Compagnia Principio Attivo, Lecce), L’eternità dolcissima di Renato Cane (directed by Vinicio Marchioni, premiered in 2016 at Teatro Brancaccino in Rome and scheduled in the next season 2017-18 at Teatro dell’Elfo in Milan) and Dimmi, su cosa giuri?. She also wrote the novels Smamma (Einaudi 2014) and Mariti o Le imperfezioni di Gi (Einaudi 2015).
THE SWEETEST ETERNITY OF RENATO CANE
Characters: 1 man – available in Italian
Renato Cane, a man whose life is spent in a little rewarding job (psychotropic drugs rep), finds out he has to die. Accidentally, he comes into contact with an advertisement on the tram that recites: “If you have to die, do not let your relatives deal with your funeral, take care of it yourself, and earn yourself quality and good taste”. So he decides to contact the agency “BBB.trumpet of the lord. com”, going closer to the business of death. He was first offered a special treatment for the funeral, and finally he is convinced that by simple swiping the credit card he will be able to buy, not a funeral, but a kit, a spirit’s kit that, thanks to a sophisticated technology, will guarantee him to live forever, out of the body, and away from everything that, in his real life, prevents him from living happily. The only thing Renato Cane has ever really loved is to paint the “crushed paintings”; so he decides to give himself to “BBB.trumpet of the lord. com”, in exchange for this post-mortem world, in which it will be possible for him to perform this painting activity full time. The problem arises when, at some point in history, Renato Cane experiences a fortuitous, unexpected healing. What to do with the life kit now that you no longer have to die? “Business is business and can’t wait”, those of BBB say, having already received the wire transfer and prepared the personalized treatment; however, it is only to anticipate the inevitable destiny. The story-monologue, only in the end, will reveal its business gear: the whole text is nothing but a huge sales strategy, a tale for the promotion of the funeral company, BBB trumpet of the Lord.com.
SIBLINGS
Characters: 1 man, 1 woman – available in Italian
This text, as the title suggests, talks about two brothers. It’s a family story, a sort of saga, unresolved and fragile like all family stories. The siblings (brother M and sister B) investigate a reality that deprives them of the possibility of a unified understanding, a reality that does not allow them a common view.
Both of them struggle, using words, to put something back in place, to give a pacified role within a history of conflict. At the end, each of them will have drawn their own path of existence, without knowing how to include the other. However, this effort, this encounter and understanding attempt, will be presented as a germ, a possibility, a brotherhood hypothesis: a proximity, a communion or something that unites but, at the same time, equally strong, separates.
Edition 2017-2020
Journal: Valentina Diana on the translation residency in Milan
Read below the report Valentina Diana wrote on the translation residency on her text Fratelli that she held on
