About the Playwright

Hervé Ducroux on Enzo Consoli

 

 

    I encountered the plays of Enzo Consoli several years ago when I had the pleasure of directing "Igloo", a very refined and intelligent work. When I read other works by him, I realized that those were the constant qualities of the author’s creations. I felt I was confronted with something new, something that is born of a Northern European tradition but expressed with Latin inventiveness. It was not so much the deliciously accessible language that was "new", but the mental mechanisms of the characters that, due to its apparent everyday quality, transports us into a maze of cerebral constructions and relationships that are extremely fanciful. His imagination takes off in an exponential manner. It is a theater with a great poetic range concealed in the miniscule folds of human relations.

     I admired the refinement of the mechanisms, the intelligence of the mental development. I smiled at the irony and the tenderness with which Consoli looks at his characters and I loved above all his "unnaturalness". It is a work that escapes from the natural but one that is founded on a deeply-rooted sense of truth. A liar. A liar who always tells the truth. His falseness derives from the truth: that is, Theater. And it is beautiful theater because at the center of it is man, man in his essence, not in what he says. On the contrary, there is an almost constant dicotamy between the word and the thought.  Perhaps this is why Consoli’s characters, because they try to deceive their thoughts, are so verbose, so inclined to speak. They are looking for a way. 

    Consoli never tells you where he is going, or else he tells you clearly, but only because he is running in another direction. He goes down streets that he continually abandons but that in the end all reconnect. He builds improbable castles of cards. He surprises and convinces us exactly when he invents characters that tell improbable stories, stories that in the end we realize are ours -- our lives, our prisons, our individual lives and our collective one. It is a look at ourselves that is grotesque and bitterly sympathetic, but never predictable and always acute. It is a theater that loves man. This is Enzo Consoli’s merit.

Click here for

THE PLAYS

 

 

Home Page