Anna Karenina

Theatre director Luca De Fusco stages one of the most important novels in the history of literature. His aim is to analyze the restless soul of Anna Karenina and her relationships with the characters around her. Karenina pays the price for her extreme sensitivity and desire to live her life fully, in a society ruled by hypocrisy and bourgeois respectability.

The adaptation of the novel, the result of collaboration with playwright Gianni Garrera, does not expect to transfer to the theatrical stage all the psychological and literary complexities of the work that Tolstoy first published in serial form between 1875 and 1877.

The director's focus on the events and mechanisms around the protagonist, played by Galatea Ranzi, concentrates on the three couples in the story, understood as metaphors for three different destinies: the cursed but passion-filled one of Anna, Vronjsky and Karenin, the bitter and unsuccessful one of Oblonsky and Dolly, and the serene and blessed one of Levin and Kitty.

The show's evocative set design recalls an imposing train station, which weighs down like an inauspicious fate on the protagonist, and makes use of film-like projections according to a meta-theatrical mechanism often used by De Fusco.

The intention to enhance the novel led the director to the choice of maintaining its literary structure through faithfully reproduced dialogues, which are alternated with several “asides”, that create a Brechtian effect of estrangement.

Anna Kerenina
by Lev Tolstoj
adaptation Gianni Garrera and Luca De Fusco
direction Luca De Fusco
set and costume design Marta Crisolini Malatesta
light design Gigi Saccomandi
music Ran Bagno
choreography Alessandra Panzavolta
projections Alessandro Papa 
assistant director Lucia Rocco
with
Galatea Ranzi (Anna Karenina)
and with (in alphabetical order) 
Debora Bernardi (Dolly) 
Francesco Biscione (Levin) 
Giovanna Mangiù (Betsy) 
Giacinto Palmarini (Vronskij) 
Stefano Santospago (Oblonskij) 
Paolo Serra (Karenin)
Mersila Sokoli (Kitty)
Irene Tetto (Lidija)

production Teatro Stabile di Catania / Teatro Biondo di Palermo

duration: 2 hours and a half, and intermission