Ruggero Cappuccio: «My double challenge from the theater to the cinema»

He has just finished shooting «Shakespea-King of Naples», based on his play of the same name, still performed after 29 years. Another film by him, “The smile of San Giovanni”, which he directed together with Nadia Baldi, participates in the “Torino film festival” and will be screened today, out of competition. Roger Hood, just seen in the role of himself in “Effetto notte” by Bellocchio, alternates the direction of the “Campania teatro festival” with the activities of writer and director. Both films rely on visionary stories, where poetry is the vital breath that permeates them. Both originate from dramaturgies. Therefore, they were born for the theatre. And the question arises spontaneously.

Hood, why transpose the two titles from scene to set?
«The smile of San Giovanni was the victim of the technical paralysis caused by Covid. The text was intended for Mercadante, but I realized, with its director Roberto Andò, that the forced seclusion would not have allowed it to be staged; however, it would have been fascinating and useful to make a film of it, thanks to the visionary nature of the pièce».

And for «Shakespea-King of Naples»?
«The reason is the visual imagination, with which the entire dramaturgy is imbued. Calvino noted that Basile is a deformed Neapolitan Shakespeare, due to the commonality of languages, a certain use of metaphors, the recourse to those aspects of nature that reflect human passions, the coexistence between high and low, between poetic and spiritual peaks and hymns to lower waist. There is no evidence that the Bard ever landed in Naples, but with the imagination one can imagine that he did; and that he met the young Desiderio, loved him, brought him with him to London … and that he is the mysterious recipient of his 154 Sonnets. In short, I was attracted by the short circuit between those two worlds and those two languages. And in fact, in the film English, Italian and a possible seventeenth-century Neapolitan are spoken».

The differences between scene and set?
«At the theater the show plays on two actors, who refer to other characters and other visions, the viceroy, Shakespeare, the people, the young Desiderio, the actors of the London Globe. I have long wanted the veil to fall on the unseen on stage. I wanted to create a structure capable of highlighting that submerged world and giving flesh and voice to creatures that in the theater were ghosts, could have become characters in a screenplay. In the end, the film is an immense subjective view of Desiderio, and the story is always poised between reality and fiction. Therefore, I didn’t need a real England, but one filtered by the imagination of a Neapolitan. I shot on beaches, in caves, royal palaces and in the poor people’s hotel».

The themes of the two works?
«Eros, genius, beauty, and death, for Shakespea-King of Naples, played by Alessandro Preziosi, Peppe Servillo, Elio De Capitani, Giovanni Esposito, the debutant Pasquale Zappariello and, in the role of the Bard, Jacopo Rampini , who lives in America and communicates in English with Desiderio in the film. So much so that the two, at first, do not understand each other. As for the Smile of San Giovanni, with Claudio Di Palma, again Giovannino Esposito, Alfonso Postiglione and Marina Sorrenti, it tells the aggression of the presumed modernity to the poetic world».

The plot?
«In 43, in the middle of the war, Giacinto Valguarnera is the custodian of the tradition of an ancient family of lapsed former landowners; he is a poet and passionate about poetry, he lives with his five sisters in a very small town in Cilento, now depopulated. The women would like to leave. He strenuously resists temptations to leave their secular home. At his door, on a June night, two people knock, an alleged great poet and an alleged great painter, as singular as they are disturbing. The meeting will upset everyone’s life.’

Can you anticipate some news of the next edition of the «Campania teatro festival»?
«It will still be a multidisciplinary review, but we live in difficult times for the arts. Confirming the results achieved, ensuring continuity, is already a conquest».

«Quartieri di vita», his session dedicated to civil and social theatre, in the end involves, despite the onerous commitment, only a hundred or so young people.
“Quantity damages quality; and, then, those hundred call many other people, groups, companies, artists, they create a virtuous circuit. They sow culture.”

Ruggero Cappuccio: «My double challenge from the theater to the cinema»