Re Chicchinella

Re Chicchinella’s story is both serious and laughable. It is based on one of those moral tales collected by the 16th-century Italian writer Giambattista Basile in his famous collection of fairy tales, Lo cunto de li cunti (Cuento de cuentos). A king, out hunting, finds himself in desperate need and cleans himself with the nearest thing at hand: a hen he believes to be dead. But it is not. The animal enters his body, and from then on, it will expel, through the king, golden eggs — to the ruler’s disgrace, unable to bear the pain, and to the delight of his relatives and the court, who watch wealth pile up before their eyes.

With this grotesque allegory on hypocrisy and greed, Italian director Emma Dante concludes, after Pupo di zucchero and La scortecata, a trilogy of works based on Basile’s fairy tales — tales that hold for Italian culture the place the Brothers Grimm do for German literature, or Perrault for France. Dante is one of the leading voices on the Italian stage, bringing joyful moments to Italian theatre with her raw, physical performances and irreverent spirit.

Her intention with this production was to shake the audience. She admires Basile’s work for its crudeness, its baroque flair, and its vulgarity, crafted in a way that even children could grasp the world as it is. As in the other works of her trilogy, Dante subjects the stories to a ferocious rewriting, a conscious distortion to serve her purpose, which in this case, as she explains, is to tell “the defects of a completely indifferent and cold family, to deal with power and show how it can destroy everything.” And she does so through the burlesque, the cruel, the puppet-like gesturing of her characters, and with a musical, almost dance-like rhythm, carried by baroque pavans and the music of Franco Battiato.