Giovanni Scifoni in Fra

Giovanni Scifoni in "Fra': St Francis the Superstar of the Middle Ages'.

How do you talk about St. Francis of Assisi without being monstrously banal? How can this show be staged without sounding like a Jovanotti song?
If I ask an anti-clerical atheist “tell me a saint you like” he will say: Francis. Why does everyone know St Francis? Why have tens of thousands of texts been written about him? Why is he so irresistible? And why him? He was not the only one practising pauperism. At that time, there were plenty of saints and heretical movements that had made the same extreme choice. What was so special about this petty-bourgeois suburban slumdog who left everything behind to become a ragamuffin?
What was special about him was that he was an artist. Perhaps the greatest in history. His sermons were crazy, visionary masterpieces. They were performances of contemporary theatre.
He played with the elements of nature, he improvised in French, quoting passages from the chanson de geste from memory, twisting their meaning, he used the body, the nude, even his own illness, physical pain and muteness.
On 24 December 2023, we celebrated the 800th anniversary of the Greccio nativity scene, the most ingenious (and most copied) invention of Francis. But there was no SIAE at the time.
This monologue, orchestrated with medieval lauds and ancient instruments by Luciano di Giandomenico, Maurizio Picchiò and Stefano Carloncelli, questions the’enormous persuasive power that the pop figure of Francis generates on us contemporaries, and traces the life of the poverello of Assisi and his obsessive effort to recount the mystery of God in every form, right up to the physical wear and tear that would lead him to death: from preaching to the pigs to the composition of the Canticle of Creatures, the first Italian vernacular lyric composition in history.
Francesco sings the beauty of Brother Sun from the darkness of his cell, blind and ravaged by illness. No one in history has narrated God with such ingenious creativity. Francis knew how to enchant audiences, endless crowds, how to make people laugh, cry, how to sing, how to dance. The real problem I had to face in preparing this show was that Francesco was a much better actor than I was.
And then the grand finale, death, the relationship of brotherhood, almost of carnal love, that Francesco had with Sora nostra morte corporale, from which nullu homo alive can escape. Nor will the audience be able to escape from this end, chained in the theatre seats they too will be forced to face the real, the last, great taboo of our contemporaneity: we are not immortal.

Program and cast

by and with Giovanni Scifoni
direction Francesco Ferdinando Brandi 
original music Luciano Di Giandomenico
antique instruments Luciano Di Giandomenico, Maurizio Picchiò and Stefano Carloncelli

a co-production Theatre Carcano, Mismaonda and Viola Productions