Pericles

Antonio Latella, one of Italy's most innovative actors and directors, has directed for the 2006 edition of Project Thierry Salmon an intense review of Shakespeare's Pericles. He worked with an extraordinary company of young european actors and now they are going to debut at La Biennale di Venezia - 39th International Theatre Festival.

Pericles is a man, a hero, who rarely stands on dry land but instead chooses the sea as the origin of his wandering in search of truth, or simply a home where to stop and possibly finally tell the story to others and to himself, that self that has stopped being a reflection at the bottom of the sea. Instead of teaching the passengers on this ship, I hope that they will keep it afloat in order to allow me to learn as much as possible and perhaps with every port, every unexpected event or storm, we will succeed in burying one of the many masquerades of our day-to-day lives, and in finding the right motivation, that need that led us to set sail for the first time and travel between the red curtains, the ports of the world.
Antonio Latella

Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.
Herman Melville