“Why are you here?” is the first of many questions that two ‘lieutenants’ barricaded on a platform ask each other. The questions are elementary, and their discourse is even more threadbare; but at a closer glance (and here, there is no alternative) cracks begin to spread across its reassuringly ordinary surface. Daily life and its habits are suddenly drawn into a vortex of radical doubt, and the faultless logic of their respective questions is drawn into an irony that demands honesty.

The two figures are ‘lieutenants’ because they must control the place where they are barricaded, a symbol of the resoluteness required by the task of defending the logic underlying their reasoning. The only driving force, around which everything revolves, is the continuous generation of questions that the provisional replies are unable to satiate, not even those offered by religion, responsible for providing definitive answers. The sceptical and widowed nature of this dialogue opens onto an endless sea of comedy that leaves us perplexed.

The theatrical form chosen for this performance corresponds to a classic pedagogical dialogue, in order to represent a weightless world where ‘nothing happens’, as they say. The prosody of the sentences gives increasing speed to the questions, and the idioms in a quasi-dialect invented by Chiara Guidi make them resonate in a domestic and ‘humble’ environment. This vernacular bitterness leaves a trace of blood on an icily sophisticated reasoning that becomes, once again, primitive and insolent.

Why Are You Here? is the third part of the cycle The Deep Realm by Claudia Castellucci, after The Life of Lives and Dialogue of the Slaves.

Duration 60 minutes.

Video excerpt

Il Teatro di Radio3 – Tutto Esaurito, 24/11/2018

Listen to the Podcast → “The Deep Realm. Why Are You Here? Radio reading”