Mercutio Can't Die. Romeo and Juliet Re-created by Carmelo Bene and Armando Punzo

If we accept Grotowski’s idea that a mise-en-scène is a reaction to a dramatic text rather than a representation of it, we can observe that the reaction of Italian experimental theatre towards Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been generally of a deconstructive and even ‘polemical’ kind. Differently from some plays – such as Hamlet and Macbeth – which avant-garde theatre has privileged and treated like admired masterpieces even when dismantling them or using them as mere pretexts, experimental groups and directors have mainly considered the centrality of the love theme in Romeo and Juliet as an element of weakness. Therefore, they have tried to dampen the ‘romantic’ aspects of the story, by chilling or parodying them, or even marginalizing the sentimental core of the play and its two protagonists. This aim is sometimes pursued by emphasizing Mercutio’s undeveloped tragic potentialities, as we can see in both the plays on which our analysis is focused: Carmelo Bene’s Romeo e Giulietta (storia di Shakespeare) (1976) and Armando Punzo’s Romeo e Giulietta. Mercuzio non vuole morire (2011). These plays share some important features: in both cases the director plays, as an actor, the rôle of Mercutio, who doesn’t die and becomes the main character and the symbolic heart of the drama; besides, both the texts are recomposed by grafting various literary references on the basis of Shakespeare’s words (Romeo and Juliet, of course, but also quotations from other plays and from the sonnets). This paper aims to examine the new dramatic and poetic balance that the emphasis on Mercutio’s character and the practice of intertextuality impose on the two plays and on their performative conception and realization.