La vita agra
«A ‘book-bomb’, full of anger, defused by public acclaim and the consensus of the cultural industry». A harsh portrait of the Milan of the economic boom, La vita agra by Luciano Bianciardi comes to the Piccolo, directed by Giacomo Bisordi and with Paolo Pierobon in the role of the protagonist.
In the frenzied years of the economic boom, in the midst of the gleaming promises of a Milan in the midst of transformation, Luciano Bianciardi wrote La vita agra, one of the most important and caustic novels of the late twentieth century, now at the Piccolo and directed by Giacomo Bisordi. The tragedy of the Ribolla mine, which, in 1954, saw the death of forty-three miners, serves as the backdrop to the story of a man from the Tuscan provinces with a plan for revolt against the company deemed responsible for the accident: that of planting a bomb at the headquarters. However, the undertaking, fuelled by resentment and a hunger for justice, begins to crack in the face of life’s unpredictability – love, the need for money, the wearying daily life of a city running at breakneck speed – finally expiring, crushed by the same mechanisms that the novel aims to attack. With Paolo Pierobon in the lead role, the play interweaves the plot of the novel with the story of its writing: a voyage exploring an Italy on the cusp between the Fifties and the Sixties, enveloped in its contradictions, and a reflection on the profound sense of creating culture.
Duration: the play is currently in production and the duration may vary
