A story of myths, at once funny and poetic, which sees intertwined between them two stories: the spasmodic search for a legendary hidden treasure and a forbidden love born under a bad star. We will thus witness the clash between the most vital and the most disruptive force in the world: Love and Power.

It is 1420, the Patriarchate of Aquileia is defeated by Venetian soldiers led by Captain Tristan Sorestan, a mercenary in the pay of the Serenissima. Thus the Friulian peasants find themselves being sotàns, subjugated. Among them is Malacarne who, in order not to abandon his land and redeem himself, agrees to become a servant of Pantalone, a Venetian merchant who financed of the enterprise. The latter covets the legendary golden puteum and therefore commissions the Friulian along with the Turk Karagoz to find the treasure. Blinded by lust for power and money, he barters his young daughter Bora in exchange for supremacy mercantile over the conquered territories. But the girl, aided by her wet nurse, escapes from the clutches of her master father, going on to meet an unexpected love….

<< Imagine folk theater and commedia dell’arte as the stage expression of street art: strong colors, sharp hues, high tempo, sudden changes. Masks and folklore travel like a train rattling coast to coast toward a summer sunset. Commedia dell’arte is visceral, sweaty, generous, and the BRAT company is a young company that for years has been pursuing poetics aimed at creating a fusion of tradition and innovation. Malacarne is, in fact, the only Friulian mask of the harlequin family brought to the stage here in a riot of languages, dialects, sounds, noises and songs. A colorful dive into the stories and ballads of the Friulian territory that are intertwined with the story of love and power experienced and suffered by the unfortunate Malacarne, who here becomes a contemporary figure of the worker without protections, of the person willing to do anything to avoid having to migrate. An artistic operation that is based on love for that theater made of flesh, dust and laughter, in which the spectator takes a journey through time while remaining anchored in his own guts and feeling the blood pulsing in his veins. >>

Art Directors – SPK Theatre

<< BRAT elaborates its own relationship with masks and tradition by trying to overcome certain stereotypes that have become established with respect to the so-called “classical” commedia dell’arte […]. The comedy proceeds with rhythm and precision. The company devotes special care to choreographic movement, to the timing of even physical dialogue between the characters. Friuli-Venezia Giulia, as well as many other regions of Italy, carries with it a complex history of conquests and wars, where an Austrian, Central European heritage and the Venetian heritage of the Serenissima meet and clash. Below the game of power, as always, lies the minute people of legends, of witches, of the countryside, lies Malacarne, good and devoted servant, wayfarer narrator […]. No longer Friuli, but the whole world on the planks of this small stage, in a tribute to the original intent of the Commedia dell’Arte: to speak of the present through the powerful medium of fairy tale and comedy, in an abstraction that, however, does not renounce biting, ferocious references through the irreverence of the mask, which does not concede or console, but wounds as only true comedy knows how to do. >>

Angela Forti – La Falena, Metastasio Theatre