Chesteton at Teatro Novelli in Rimini

The tradition of the great Meeting shows played externally to the area of Rimini Fiera takes up again. Monday 19 and Wednesday 20 of august, Teatro Novelli in Rimini hosts the opening night of “Manalive – a man alive”, freely drawn from “Manalive”, probably the most famous work by Chesterton.
It’s not by chance that an external space has been chosen. Meeting 2013 title, “The Human Person: a State of Emergency”, is the field on which the great English polemicist and writer builds his work in the firm belief that “at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet. The intellectuals among whom I moved were not even alive enough to fear death. They hadn’t enough blood in them to be cowards. Until a pistol barrel was poked under their very noses they never even knew they had been born”.
Yet in 1912 Chesterton was aware that in the general climate of routine, taken-for-grantedness and sadness characterizing modernity, the only novelty capable to irrupt in is a man alive, an emerging man in state of emergency times (as one could say at the Meeting), a man who still wonders in frofnt o reality and usual things.
The 1912 novel becomes a play. It is a detective story without the crime. On the dock, not only the facts but also their construction, or the interpretation of life itself. Direction, by Otello Cenci, is meant to witness to the public of Novelli and Rimini that only an interaction with an alive man may generate an original taste in everyday facts and in people we meet.
The alive man is a beloved topic to the Meeting which dedicates a big exhibition to Chesterton in Piazza Terna C1. Its path let us take a look at the world by assuming the perspective of Chestertons. Chesterton’s home is the place were crucial moments of the writer’s work happen.
Many are man and women – alive – that have been taking part in this work: Ubaldo Casotto, Edoardo Rialti, Annalisa Teggi, Gloria Garafulich Garbois among others. The last one in particular will present on Wednesday at 11.15 a. m., at Caffè letterario Eni A3, her book on Chesterton which stems from her work in Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture.
Thursday 22 “A te come te” by Giovanni Testori goes on stage, a scenic reading by Gabriele Allevi and Luca Doninelli with UBU Prize Ermanna Montanari.

C.C.