Hotel Babele

Written by Compagnia Teatrale Petit Soleil
Directed by Aldo Vivoda

Marta/Rosa Lespinas - Lucia Gadolini
Maddalena/Elke Schultz - Silvia Melotti
Maria/Shirley Weiseman - Susannah Tresilian
Pietro/Jean Paul Pajot - Aldo Vivoda
Gabriele/Vasilj Stepanov - Sergio Pancaldi
Matteo/Andrea Amen - Andrea Neami

Argilla Teatro, Rome, Italy 6-10 May 2004
Auditorium dei Frati, San Daniele, Italy August 2004
Contact Theatre, Manchester, UK March 2005
Sala ProNovus, Trieste, Italy October 2005
Teatro Triàngulo, Madrid, Spain February 2006

with street theatre performances in Monfalcone and Padova

Following a world wide tour from London to Paris to New York, Italian theatre company Petit Soleil brought their comic-fantasy play to Rome. The lights go on and five strange creatures appear, waking from a deep sleep, hypothetical hotel staff, buffoons covered by cobwebs, with a visual metaphor of a door opening to new vistas.

And then, another five characters: colored beings that have fallen into the dead people’s country, today seemingly stereotyped, clownish beings that play around with our feelings: loves, whims and pains…… Hotel Babele is a place suspended between heaven and earth that may exist in everyone’s imagination - peopled by conflicts, friendships, surreals situations and buffoons with ignominious characters.

PRESS:

“Hotel Babele” – Baron’s Court
Endearing is a word one can rarely use to describe physical theatre, especially when it involves arch clowning and funny voices. But the disciplined Petit Soleil troupe from Trieste deliver their 90-minute show with a beguiling intimacy that perfectly suits this tiny cellar venue, moving from tableaux vivants and solo turns to a funereal last supper, and ending with a slyly choreographed curtain-call to milk applause.

For six years director performer Aldo Vivoda worked with Ariane Mnouchkine’s Theatre du Soleil. He founded this multi-lingual company on his return to Italy in 1994, creating street theatre and comic fantasy while running popular educational projects. This latest production, launching an international tour, is set in a half-way house, an hotel for the dead with six main characters apparently destined for hell.

A little zanni comedy – as with flamenco dancing – goes a long way. And here we have a large slice for starters as the hotel’s grotesque servants wake, ablute and get ready to greet yet another group of onward-bound guests. But once they abandon their commedia masks the actors emerge chrysalis-like, transformed into stylish creatures coming to terms with their recent demise.

Finally the stage is transformed into a supper table for six black-clad dinners, still essentially childish, before their ghostly danse macabre returns us to “business as usual” at the hotel. But be warned, their droll closing antics will keep you clapping until your palms sting.