Teatro Stabile Torino

Descrizione

History of TST:The document by which it was created dates back to the night between 27 & 28 May 1955, when Turin Council, presided over by the mayor, Amadeo Peyron, and supported by Maria Tettamanzi, councillor responsible for education, sat long into the night to discuss the aims of the new cultural authority and to decide upon an annual contribution of 20 million lire and the concession of the antiquated auditorium of Teatro Gobetti. The newly created Piccolo Teatro della Città di Torino, after the crisis of twenty years of fascism and wartime destruction, was given the role of reviving the theatrical tradition of the city which had seen the creation of the Compagnia Reale Sarda in the first half of the nineteenth century and later, in the early years of the twentieth century, the thriving activity of the Teatro di Torino, founded by Riccardo Gualino, which was suppressed by Mussolini’s regime.The first two seasons were directed by Nico Pepe, a respected actor who had become known as an interpreter of Goldoni and a leading figure in the university theatre. The inaugural production, which opened on the 3 November 1955 in the restored Teatro Gobetti, was Goldoni’s “Gli innamorati”, along with a one-act play by Alfred De Musset entitled “Non si può pensare a tutti”. The director was a very young Anna Maria Rimoaldi, who was to make a name for herself as the leading spirit behind the Premio Strega. In its first year, the theatre staged ten productions, with 171 performances in Turin, ten in other regional theatres and 18 outside the Piedmont region. During the 1957/58 season, Pepe was succeeded by the young Venetian director Gianfranco De Bosio who directed the theatre for the next decade and rapidly succeeded in establishing the reputation of the Turin repertory company at national level. With the centenary celebrations of the Unification of Italy in 1961, he triumphed on the stage of Teatro Carignano with a presentation of “La resistibile ascesa di Arturo Ui” (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui) by Bertolt Brecht, one of the rare performances of Brecht that escaped the monopoly of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. From then onwards, the historic auditorium of Teatro Carignano, owned by the municipal council and privately managed for many years, was to regularly host major TST productions.It was only in 1977 that this eighteenth century theatre, prototype of the Italian style theatre, officially became the headquarters of the Teatro Stabile. The direction of De Bosio is inextricably linked with the rediscovery of Ruzante and productions of “La Moscheta” in 1960, “Anconitana e Bilora” (1965), and “I Dialoghi” (1966) that were also performed on tour abroad in Latin America (1960), in France and Belgium (1965) and in Russia (1966). De Bosio dedicated great attention to contemporary theatre without ignoring the classical theatre of Goldoni, Shakespeare, Chekhov and Pirandello. From France, he imported the Theatre of the Absurd of Eugéne Ionesco (“Sicario senza paga” (Killer Without Pay) and “Il re muore” (Exit the King)) and Samuel Beckett (“Giorni Felici”(Happy Days), “Atto senza parole” (Act without words) and “L’ultimo nastro di Krapp” (Krapp’s Last Tape)), as well as staging plays by such Italian writers as Natalia Ginzburg (“Ti ho sposato per allegria” (I Married You for the Fun of it)), Alberto Moravia (“Il mondo è quello che è” (The World is What It Is)) and in particular Primo Levi, with “Se questo è un uomo” (If This Is a Man) in 1966, the adaptation of the disturbing autobiographical account of his imprisonment at Auschwitz. De Bosio worked with some of the best known actors of the Italian stage, such as Paola Borboni, Gianni Santuccio, Lilla Brignone, Luigi Vannucchi, Ernesto Calindri, the young Dario Fo and Franca