Fantozzi. A tragedy

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Paolo Villaggio was a keen observer of our time, a unique, sagacious witness who told like few other decades of Italian history and life through those characters that - as a great comic actor - he was able to create. His narrative was a sharp social criticism, a reconstruction of a world observed through paradoxes, in its contradictions before its definitive dissolution.

Fantozzi, his wife Pina, his daughter Mariangela, his colleagues Filini, Calboni, Miss Silvani, the Honorable Knight Conte Catellani, are pieces of a mosaic, they are masks of a renewed commedia dell'arte, with which Paolo Villaggio has given voice to a human category oscillating between opportunism and malice, between flattery and violence, between disenchantment and ferocious careerism.
Starting from the 1970s, these characters have left their mark on the collective imagination, creating a previously non-existent language that was so strong and original that it determined common speech.

Villaggio records, like a very sensitive seismograph, the explosion of a world marked by the masters - those Galactic and Natural Megadirectors so similar to divinities - and by the "servants", or rather the "monstrous" clerical, profiteering, servile generation: a perpetual chorus struggle for subsistence.
In the directorial vision of Davide Livermore, if we read the pages of Villaggio carefully, then, the echo of classic tragedies, of marked and inevitable destinies, of vicissitudes that lead to the only possible solution: defeat, returns emblematically. On stage it is the actor Gianni Fantoni, who has been alongside Paolo Villaggio for a long time and inherited his stage mask (in a handover strongly desired by Villaggio himself) who gives voice and gestures to a possible Fantozzi of today. Always ready to do battle again.