57° Festival di Locarno
Andrea Liberovici, Aldo Nove
Aldo Nove
Andrea Liberovici
Gianfranco Funari
Paolo Giacchero
Paolo Giacchero
Luca Massa
Irene Novello
Fabrizio Ligi Barboni for e-motion srl
Alberto Parodi for LogicalBox srl
teatrodelsuono mini coop. a r. l.
Luca Massa
Andrea Liberovici
teatrodelsuono
1924
J.W. becomes Olympic swimming champion
1932
J.W. becomes a film idol playing the lead role in �Tarzan, the Ape Man�
1977
J.W. bangs his head and is admitted to hospital. He soon recovers, but every now and then, all of a sudden, he lets out the Tarzan cry.
J.W. is alone.
Unwell. He lives in a space halfway between a psychiatric hospital and his imagination. Halfway between reality and unreality.
J.W.�s last day, freely imagined by the authors: he moves, talks to himself and grows melancholy, caught between the myth of himself as a character � �the King of the Jungle� � and the oppressive reality of a lonely old man who feels he has been grievously misused by the great American fiction-making machine. Throughout the action he engages in an imaginary dialogue with a little stuffed lion. His voice off-screen, like a stream of consciousness, leads us into his delirium.
Dressed in undershirt and boxers, his face worn, he lies on a hospital bed on casters inside a metaphysical space. A view of the void. And then again, here, in this sort of descent into memory, deformed memory, memory which has become a place to live in, J.W. finds himself back with the same objects, the bed, the bedside table, the clogs, at the bottom of an empty Olympic pool. Against this background J.W. makes a desperate attempt to recall the past by swimming along the bottom of the pool. This short interior monologue, made up of outbursts and silences, all dedicated to the now mythical traces of this great American actor�s past, develops and is edited within the structure of a musical score made up of sounds, verbal repetitions and the actor�s breaths. A disquieting verbal and sound world which uses the poignant Tarzan cry of a toothless old man to bring out the cruel and marvelous world of fiction, the world of the cinema, or more simply, the world of failure.