"We live in hell and have lost the path that would lead us to paradise."

Barcelona"My God! My God!"Suddenly, the extraordinary actor Toni Servillo (Afragola, 1959) appears on screen. He's flustered because the plane that was supposed to take him to Barcelona has been canceled, and tomorrow, Tuesday, he's performing at the Teatro Goya. 'I still don't have my boarding pass, I'm worried,' he confesses during a press conference. 'We'd be talking about him via mobile phone from London to Barcelona; this man has traveled to the future!' he exclaims. In the show that has sold out at the Goya, The voices of DanteThe actor proposes precisely a contemporary approach to the great work of the Italian poet, the Divine Comedy. "Classics only make sense if they are revisited, if we give them a new reading through our concerns and emotions," he argues.

The voices of Dante It brings together different characters and stories on stage with Dante's original verses, on which the playwright Giuseppe Montesano writes "a critical reflection of the Divine Comedy "Expressed with the emotion of an actor, but without the narcissism of the actor," Servillo assures. This has been his great challenge: "It's not about reading a boring, intellectual, and self-indulgent essay, but rather the thought that arises from Dante's poem is transformed into a disturbing, electric, and emotional narrative. And at the same time, it moves you," says Servillo, who throughout his career has combined theater—he has often performed in our country, in 2024 in the High Season with Tre modi por non morire, by the same author – and the audiovisual – with titles such as The great beauty, Gomorrah and The DivaServillo is a great defender of the power of theater: "It is the only truly human opportunity we have to share thoughts and emotions. Theater is a celebration of intelligence and the senses. Theater is a place of human resistance, a vestige of civilization, which also allows us to disconnect from the noise of the world in a way that doesn't alienate you.

The world of yesterday, the world of today

Like all Italian students, Toni Servillo became familiar with the ComedyHe hurriedly cites the hand of references, places, and cultures that appear—"Spain, Italy, Bohemia, the Atlantic, Africa, England, the East, the West, Greece, Rome, Constantine, Aristotle: all knowledge is reflected in his work, in his dream of unity," he says—for "an infinite unity made of individual stories, which we still carry within us because we carry within us his love, his hate, his thirst for life, his feeling lost in the darkness, and his desire to emerge from it to understand what true love is."

Some of the best passages and the voices The most beautiful parts of the poem, written seven centuries ago: Ulysses's final voyage; the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca; "the indifferent, the disdainful, those who have lost their intellect and do neither good nor evil but look the other way," he notes; and the prayer at Sant Bernat asking Mary to intercede to reach the final canto.

Drawing a metaphor with the Divine ComedyHow does Toni Servillo see the world today? "We live in hell and have lost the path that would lead us to paradise," he declares. "We don't know purgatory because we live in a hellish and inhuman era." And yet, or perhaps precisely because of this, Servillo and Montesano invite the audience to gather in a theater to reflect together, to "pursue life and not suffer for life," says the actor.

These "beautiful words," however, we will only be able to hear when "I solve the practical problem of flight," says the actor, smiling, as he puffs on a cigar between his fingers.Oh, Narcissus –he tells the director of the Estación Alta, Narcís Puig–, but abbracciarti stasera or domani. Come on!"