The train journey is a romantic trip, adventurous, and the landscapes crossed, most of the times, are not accessible with other transports, they seem to have something surprising. We watch them with amazement and marvel, and in a sort of enchantment they become almost immediately landscapes of remembrance and hope, of past and future. And then there are the stations, fascinating places, real and imaginary at the same time, stage of separations and expectations, escapes and returns, illusions. It is right there, between the rails of a train station who they find each other, the interpreters of Tempo binario (Binary time) free and prisoner ones dealing with their soul journey, experts of escape and separation, fugitives of memory, with different and difficult lives to remember. Again, now they get on the train, between the parallel rails of real and inner time, with the eyes on the window and the soul lost in the mystery of the crossed spaces. Between biography and invention, the play ponders on some of the most famous pages of Le Temps retrouvé by Proust, in the direction of a social form of theater able to represent, for the interpreters and the spectators, an instrument of emotional and intellectual rework of the fundamental knot distinguishing existence. In this case, the exploration of the memory mechanisms, the thought of the forgotten childhood, the inner perception of time in relation with the idea of death, the journey as a metaphor of existence. Important topics in a path of reflection and awareness, between identification and artistic creation.
“Tempo binario” (Binary Time). Is a tiny, touching jewel, a “dead class” from the working-class suburb, lived by a group – we should properly say a “gang” – of men, on the string of memory. It starts from a memory of Proust, from the Recherche and the Madaleine: so many suggestions and emotions, can spring from a flavour, from a gesture, a fragrance.
Tempo Binario so, is a game with the past, with the nostalgia of ourselves and the world. Is a very dynamic funeral ceremony: the story of a journey toward a phantom Hades, that is the North Pole, organized to accompany the last of the group. Chasin personal or shared memories, the narration is unraveled, this reveals himself as a research for the “lost time”, kneaded with dreams and losses, teases and regrets. Slowly we will understand the true nature of this complicated path directed to the northern dawn, it will be revealed, little by little, the absurdness of the context: the “Main Character” he does not know to be dead, he doesn’t know why his childhood friends are behaving in such a strange way, he is not understanding, not yet, why some of them are much older than others.
This story “on the road to no where” purchases value, pain, warmth, thanks to the faces, the eyes, the gestures the voices: it stands out and unites in a comradeship, in his naturalness, exactly the barthesian “grain” of the voices, that recalls to popular landscapes, human, simple.
Tempo Binario is a heart breaking story of little things, objects transforming themselves in soft and delicate memory, but it doesn’t spare cheap shots and bitterness, self-mockery and disillusions: smartly using the gaunt scenic elements – benches composed or dismantled can become a boat, a car, the counter of a café, or finally a coffin – the situations increase in paintings, stations of a greatly laical via crucis, without the exclusion of an unhinged and friendly funniness. There is to laugh, retracing the sequence of events of this “band of the honest men”. All the characters are very capable, indeed they deserve the committed applause of the audience: Alessandro Bernardini, Massimo Di Stefano, Ivan Marcantoni, Romolo Napolitano, Ruggero Palmiotto, Piero Piccinin, Giancarlo Porcacchia, Sandro Verzili.
Then, yet, the laughter remains suspended, uncertain, in the abyssal silence of death. Time has gone, the mistakes are all there: behind, however, no one can come back.
(Andrea Porcheddu)
Extract from the review