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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0099  Monday, 17 January 2000.

From:           Lucia Anna Setari <hobbyhorseoo@yahoo.com>
Date:           Sunday, 16 Jan 2000 02:01:26 -0800 (PST)
Subject: 11.0082 Freedom, fate, theatre
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0082 Freedom, fate, theatre

This is just a little note in the margin.

Reading your letters about play, freedom and fate, a film came to my
memory and I wonder if some of you know it. Its title is: 'Che cosa sono
le nuvole?' (What are the Clouds?) and it is a precious little work by
the Italian poet Pier Paolo Pasolini.  In a  small and  poor theatre
there is a puppet-show.  The audience is common people  (very poor
people) and the play is a very simplified version of Othello.  During
the play the puppets (which are interpreted by actors, tied with threads
to a hidden showman) behind the wings start to wonder about their fate
and the sense of their life: Othello, for example, (who is a very simple
young man) after having resolved on stage to kill Desdemona, cannot make
out  how it could be that he, who thinks to be a good boy, will turn
into a murderer, and Jago (who is an older man) tries to comfort him
with some philosophical answers about life being a dream within a dream
(while the intellectual showman suggests some Freudian explanations).

At last, when Othello is about to kill the lady, the spectators revolt
against the puppets: they break into the stage and  pull to pieces Jago
and Othello. So the broken puppets are thrown  away,  and for the first
time in their life they go out of the theatre.  Laying among  the
sweepings, with wonder they discover the sky and the white clouds.

Then Othello asks Jago: - What are those?-

- They are the clouds. - Answer the philosophical
Jago.

- And what are the clouds? - Othello insists.

Then Jago, with a sigh: - Ah, the heartrending, the wonderful beauty of
the creation!

Yours
Lucia Anna S.

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