1. THE NARRATIVE THEATRE
Ascanio Celestini
Storie di uno scemo di guerra
Aurora Lombardi I H

2. Ascanio Celestini, who is a theatrical
author and actor, is one of the most
representative voices of the italian
«Narrative theatre»

3. He was born in Rome on 1 June
1972. He was not interested in acting
when he was a teenager.
His love for acting started when one of
his friends convinced him to attend an
acting course in Sapienza University.

4. Narrative Theatre

5. The same story told with a theatrical text or with a
narrative one has different properties because:
the theatrical text has a camouflage form; the
facts are represented directly by the actors who act
their parts, so there is not a narrator.
the narrative text has a diegetic form because
the narrator tells the facts and introduces the
characters.

6. It is a recent artistic genre beacause it
represents a union between narrative and
acting.
The narrative theatre began to expand at
the beginning of 1990s, and in the late
1990s a second generation, to which
Ascanio Celestini belongs appered.

7. Narrative theatre is a kind of theatrical
representation characterized by the presence of
on actor who tells stories about different kinds of
subjects, but he is never hidden behind one of the
characters he narrates about.

8. Storie di uno scemo di guerra

9. «Storie di uno scemo di guerra» is based on the
memories of Ascanio’s father’s memories of the
second world war which he had narrated to his son
since he was a child.
The story began on the 4th June 1944 in
Rome, when Ascanio’s father Gaetano (called Nino
by his family) and his father Sor (which means Sir
in Roman dialect) Giulio left the tavern of Sora
Irma, with whom they had decided to found a
company. While Sor Giulio and his son were trying
to find some people for their company, they saw an
onion; Nino was trying to get it when the War Idiot
shot him.

10. From that moment,the plot of «Storie di uno
scemo di guerra» develops into lots of stories and
characters.
It is a literary work based on war memories but
not like a history book which tells us about events
like the II World War in a general way, but like a
current tale, which happens while a person is
speaking.

11. Working on memories means developing an
ability which consists of bringing into the present
something that belongs to the past.
Remembering is a thing which happens while
you are telling a story, recalling something
which has already happened but until that
moment has been lost in your memory.

12. The author helps us to recall the past in the present
with memories, he is interested in how a person
remembers a particular event, not in how he or she
tells it.
Celestini did not want to describe how the historical
events happened, but how they were lived by people
who suffered because of the war.
Aurora Lombardi