In the dimness of a large wooden bedroom, the Storyteller welcomes the children. Beds are small, made of wood and provided with bedding. Everyone lies down on his own bed. Fables are often told before falling asleep and they lead to that moment – the sleep – when everybody loosens the grip on his own life. In bed “one goes back to the principle of his own presence” and “the existence is suspended: everything living beyond itself”. The Narrator is sitting in the middle of the bedroom, under the only bulb lighting the room, and she tells about all vicissitudes of Buchettino, but at the same time as she tells about them it is possible to listen to their sound track. A storm of sounds and noises wraps around the large bedroom and, in the dark, everybody can concentrate his own senses, especially the hearing. The bedroom creates an emotional and see-saw movement between interiority and exteriority; between the internal statics of maintaining one’s own place (the bed) and the external dynamics of the sounds that, by nature, goes beyond the boundaries. Inside there is the knowledge of past things; outside the possibility of experiencing present things. In solitude, in communion. The fact of being together with strangers, in a condition that is usually characterised by intimacy establishes a “single common feeling”. The running, noisy river plunges all emotional forms into the lustral bath of a common destiny: infantia. Childhood is not meant here as a life stage, but as that unique capability of feeling and experiencing the word on the very verge of the language; that is, on the threshold of what is not told, just there where the word of the human beings mixes with and welds to the one of the animals, ogres and gnomes; in that place where the word is close to the real weight of the things and to the intimacy with a body.

Created in 1995, this show is a classic piece of Childhood Theatre (it’s been staged by other Companies in France, Cile, Sud Corea, Danimark, Spain, Taiwan, Japan; and with a version in Sardinian language translated by Marcello Fois). Buchettino is a show that creates the conditions for listening to the fable. The text has been published by Orecchio Acerbo, in an audio-book illustrated by Simone Massi, from which the image published here has been taken.

Performance for adults and children from 7 years old.

Duration 60 minutes.