Kensington Gardens // Trailer - Eng Sub
A new play coming to the London stage in 2018.
London: a future, next or remote, and a xenophobic party to the government. A law that deports all non-British from British soil, patrols on the streets, immigrants are shot on sight. Six Italians get to avoid repatriation, locked away in a mansion over Kensington Park, waiting for grace. The son and sister of a singer in a middle-aged crisis and in conflict with her younger partner. A citizenship test to ward off extradition, a chemist, his wife. Pianos, lunches, glasses of alcohol, dinners, songs, a magistrate and an english girl who dreams of fame. The distances, the boundaries of identity and the illusory expectation of the future are shuffled with the affairs of a lost humanity, homeless and banned by itself.
From Italian magazine Teatro e Critica’s review:
“Four months before June 23, 2016, when British citizens responded "Yes!" to Brexit with an advisory referendum, Kensington Gardens premiered in Rome and was rewarded with the Premio Hystrio mention, one of the greatest Italian awards for dramaturgy. But Giancarlo Nicoletti's last chapter of his Trilogia del Contemporaneo was already looking beyond, not only in the historical development that would soon have led 51.9% of the UK to re-evaluate his stay in the European Union. Nicoletti's text, set in a visionary London by which a xenophobic party has physically banned the non-British, makes another difference: implanting the anguish and self-analysis of modern man described by Anton Čechov in the social loss of contemporary man, alien and alienated by a society that looms, ghettoes and then disperses.
In the structure of one of the most famous plays of modern theatre, Nicoletti is able to circulate the nineteenth century air of the Russian countryside together with a distopic paradox, as in an English television series. Let's say that if you leave home, swarms of English fanatics shoot you out because you're an Italian, an immigrant, and more an artist; that you can stay on the Crown floor only if you are considered a useful professional category; and therefore, called for an examination of British citizenship, culture and civilization. Let’s say that, thanks to a 90-day special leave, a small family of Italians tied to a famous singer remains in a villa near Kensington Gardens waiting for the party to decide its destiny. And finally suppose that the irony, the search for the characters, the plot and the style of the dialogues are profoundly those of Čechov. The short circuit that is created is evident in the theatre hall, and is perceived by the surprise with which the audience follows for two hours the dramatic nucleus of The Seagull without realizing it. Nicoletti, a thirty-year-old author and director, performs a precious rewrite; preserves from Čechov's play that taste for the characters, identifying the archetypes and then playing with them, painting today with all the strength of the Russian playwright.
While The Seagull dramatic trend consumes in fever for work and love, that of Kensington Gardens let it be society to open fire. If pressure on contemporary man reaches equally from inside and outside, suicide is revealed as a cross fire. On the scene, comig dead is no longer the nineteenth-century gull, but the corpse of the other, what we try to hide every day, but which continues to be in front of everyone's eyes.”