Border

Confine, written and performed by Alessandro Berti with the musical accompaniment of musicians Claudia Della Gatta and Leo Virgili, depicts a north sickened by an all pervasive and unrelenting illness - an apparent normality beneath which deep resentments harbour.

In a mountain valley, within a house in the centre of a small village situated at a river’s bend, a young boy tends to his mother, who has just attempted suicide. Distressed and badly shaken, the boy decides never to return to the house and takes refuge inside his dog’s kennel together with his dog.
This is the scene that opens Confine. What follows is the story behind the event. The voices of the boy and his mother take us north, to a family struck by an all pervasive, unrelenting malaise - an apparent normality beneath which deeply harboured resentments lie. And yet, it is in the nuances of these voices - his candid, his mother’s now stripped of all identity, that one can sense an underlying hope and the possibility of a way out of the abyss: a detached way of looking at things, things which in the end are not owned by anyone but have instead been abandoned and left to run their eternal and mysterious course. The boy’s father, who is a witness and often co-protagonist of the events narrated, remains a shadowy figure throughout, his unresolved mix of natural aggression and sense of social order does not find expression in speech but is communicated subliminally in the songs he sings. These songs represent the symbolic domain of reconciliation and  provide the stylistic framework of the play.