Seen at Torino Fringe Festival on the 20th of May 2023
5 Stars – neon-light dystopia
In a dystopic future, social life is organized holding freedom as the highest of values, until there can be no community anymore. There are no impositions, no laws, and no rights. Since existence only has value online, likes are votes, followers are current money, and comments can sentence someone to death. In the name of utmost freedom, each person becomes president of a State of their own, with a surface proportional to their wealth.
Four States happen to border with each other inside the apartment of former superpresident Kane (Riccardo De Leo), whose popularity has dropped overnight. Felix (Daniele Ronco) can’t be troubled, but shadows stretch over his good mood. Tea (Lia Tomatis), who has a hidden and very ancient past, is evasive and cynical. Being defrost after two hundred years, Noa (Gianluca Guastella) tries not to surrender to this unwanted future.
The four characters represent four radically different stands. Conflicts are inevitable, and discussions engage on themes fundamental to humankind. What is freedom? What are rights? Who can decide what, and for whom? What features set humans apart from other species? Lia Tomatis’s original, highly political play faces contradictions and paradoxes emerging from our present with irony and spot-on criticism.
Costumes (Augusta Tibaldeschi) and scenography (Jacopo Valsania) are extraordinary. The latter, especially, is as simple in concept as it is effective in its result: a cage of vertical neon lights shapes the available space; the light configuration is explored to some very interesting solutions. Under Luigi Orfeo’s direction, everything runs so smooth that you even forget that decisions were taken to get to the final form of the play. The small, not very relevant imperfections are due to the small dimensions of the stage and absence of the wings in the theatre of Onda Larsen, the company that produced the show and is a Fringe host.
The world that is depicted in this play is not technology-dominated. Technology is comparatively little more developed than it is now, but the focus of the dystopic setting is on society, rights, education, laws, ideals… Changes in those fields can look smaller and less impactful. The play warns us from them, in a future that could be way closer than two hundred years, where cancel culture has reached its extremes and resolved its paradoxes by overcoming any form of humanism. The most disturbing and willingly uncomfortable trait of Resti umani is the depiction of a world that is strangely unreal, but at the same time all too close to real. Hope is as tiny as a naïve poem, and as powerful.
16th-21st of May, 20.00 pm
Running time: 65 minutes
Venue: Spazio Kairòs, Via Mottalciata 7, Torino
Tickets and Info: https://www.tofringe.it/eventi-23/resti-umani/
Company Website: https://ondalarsen.org/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ondalarsen_teatro/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/onda.larsen
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheOndalarsen?reload=9&app=desktop&cbrd=1
Butterwort 
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