An 11-year-old girl who has been recognized by a French court as consenting to the rape she suffered from her older brother’s friend decides, having become a woman, to take justice into her own hands. The story is continuously divided between past and present: the first set in an amusement park, the second in the woman’s home. In both places violence takes place, but the roles are reversed. Con la carabina is a lucid and impartial text, which escapes the idea of categorically dividing the world into good and bad, but analyzes the cultural and anthropological mechanisms that trigger certain violent behaviors. This analysis, together with a lively and fascinating writing, are the elements that led me first to inhabit it, then to suffer it, and finally to stage it. The result is a nightmare-performance, a non-place, in which there are two actors/ props who become now teenagers now adults and evoke through words and a few scenic elements, the dynamics of an atrocious story.

The performance is claustrophobic and violent, moving punctuated by the lights of a photographic set that constantly changes at the hands of the actors themselves. Designed for small venues in which the audience’s distance from the stage space is minimal, the spectator’s perspective therefore is close and continually disturbed by these light planters, which put him or her in the uncomfortable and at the same time prurient role of the one who spies on the most private of privates. In front of it, play is interspersed with horror, youth with death; it is a ghastly playroom, a Squid Game in which those who have paid for a ticket can watch a rape or a death up close. There are no winners in this hellish wheel, only a mirror of a society that has failed resoundingly. Between rabbits, toys and Billie Eilish songs parades a story like so many, a miserable story for which it is impossible not to feel pity and deep sorrow.


by Pauline Peyrade with Danilo Giuva and Ermelinda Nasuto translation Paolo Bellomo lights Vincent Longuemare sound design Francesco Curci costumes Angela Tomasicchio assistant director Nina Martorana organization Silvia Milani

direction and set design Licia Lanera production Compagnia Licia Lanera in coproduction with POLIS Teatro Festival in collaboration with Angelo Mai thanks to E Production

duration 50 min

Licia Lanera, actress, playwright, theater director, since 2006. In her career she has 14 plays and an Ubu award in 2014 as best Italian actress under 35. In 2020, she concludes the Trilogy on Russian authors, Guarda come nevica, with a cast of 20 actors and staff. In 2020 she is involved in the Zona Rossa project: Licia and 5 other artists lived at the Bellini Theater in Naples without being able to leave for more than two months and produce the performance SETTANTASEI of which Licia is coauthor.