29/11/2022 15 pm
The book, Orson Welles e il teatro, Shakespeare e oltre (Bulzoni, 2022), focuses on the theatrical career of Orson Welles, after the period of his glorious Mercury Theatre (1937-1941) and his most famous film, Citizen Kane, (1941). The aim of this work is not only to show that Welles continued to work in the theatre beyond 1941 but to prove that his “second” theatre career was equally innovative, experimental and imaginative. The main purpose of this paper is to place Orson Welles among the early postmodern theatre directors, especially because of his non-observance of the dramatic text, freedom with which he mixed various texts and various historical periods in the same production and as a consequence, invention of the performance text. For Welles was not important if he was the author of the original text, or that he "edited" the scenes from different texts by other authors, especially Shakespeare. The multiplicity of historical references he used in his texts came from the profound intellectual awareness of the relationship between history and the theatre, as well as contemporary society and the theatre.