"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 is stunned because the plane that was supposed to take him to Barcelona has been cancelled and tomorrow, Tuesday, he is performing at the Goya Theatre. "I still don't have my boarding pass, I'm worried," he confesses in a film set. "We would talk about him on our cell phones from London to Barcelona; this man has travelled to the future!" he exclaims. In the show, which sold out at the Goya Theatre, Le voci di Dante, the actor proposes precisely a contemporary approach to the great work of the Italian poet, the Divine Comedy. "Classics only make sense if we revisit them, if we give them a new reading through our concerns and emotions," he argues.

Le voci di Dante brings different characters and stories to the stage with Dante's original verses about which the playwright Giuseppe Montesano writes "a critical reflection of the Divine Comedy expressed with acting emotion but without the narcissism of the actor," says Servillo. This has been his great challenge: "It is not about reading a boring, intellectual and self-satisfied essay, but rather the thought that arises from Dante's poem is transformed into a disturbing, electric, emotional story. and at the same time move," says Servillo, who has combined throughout his career the 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 Il divo–. Servillo 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 is not alien to you.

The world of yesterday, the world of today

Like all Italian students, Toni Servillo became familiar with the Comedy. He quickly cites the hand of references, places and cultures that appear –"Spain, Italy, Bohemia, Atlantic, Africa, England, East, West, Greece, Rome, Constantine, Aristotle: all knowledge is reflected in his work, in his dream of unity", he says– for "infinite made of individual stories, which we still carry inside because we carry inside their love, their hate, their thirst for life, their feeling lost in darkness and their desire to want to get out of 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' last voyage; the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca; "the careless, the indifferent, 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 for Mary to intercede to reach the last canto.

Making 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 time." And yet, or perhaps for that very reason, 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, will only be heard when "I solve the practical problem of flight," says the actor, smiling, brandishing a cigar between his fingers.Oh, oh, Narcissus –he tells the director of the Estación Alta, Narcís Puig–, but hug you stasera or domani. Come on!"