Joan of Arc

Maria Luisa Spaziani's play Joan of Arc returns this year at the Teatro di Villa Torlonia, directed by Luca De Fusco. The play stars the young and talented Mersila Sokoli (2025 Le Maschere del Teatro Italiano Award for Best Emerging Performer). The play, in which the protagonist is the focus of a monologue, produced by the Teatro di Roma with the Teatro Stabile di Catania, offers audiences the opportunity to rediscover the revolutionary and timeless figure of a young woman who rebels against the norms of her time, waging a battle against superstition, misogyny, oppression, and violence.

Based on a poem in unrhymed hendecasyllable octaves entitled Joan of Arc (1990) by Maria Luisa Spaziani, a distinguished French scholar who had not written it for the stage but who enthusiastically embraced the idea of ​​staging her little masterpiece, it was conceived from the outset as an intimate, almost hushed, essential conversation, which brings to us the figure of the "Maid of Orleans" in an anti-rhetorical, and therefore more human, manner, stripped of her heroic and almost mythical dimension. The result is this theatrical "gem" which, born from an innovative and original reinterpretation of the character, brings her more alive than ever.

Photo credits: Claudia Pajewski