Innominabile 27

Innominabile 27 is an original production by Compagnia #SIneNOmine, inspired by the Theatre of the Absurd and by its power not so much to represent as to reveal the human condition when time comes to a standstill, language wears thin, and identity begins to fracture. Few writers have illuminated the dimension of waiting as profoundly as Samuel Beckett: time returning upon itself, gestures endlessly repeated, the voice persisting even when there seems to be nothing left to say. Within a prison, this intuition is no literary abstraction, but a concrete experience. Waiting becomes physical space, the measure of days, the shape of memory, the very condition of captivity.

Alongside Beckett stands Jean Genet, who points toward another essential threshold: that of desire, guilt, disguise, and inverted identity. Through both his personal history as a prisoner and his writing, prison becomes not merely a place of confinement, but a cruel theatre of the human condition, where every role may be unmasked and recreated.

Part of this same lineage is Rick Cluchey, once incarcerated at San Quentin and later founder of the San Quentin Drama Workshop: a pivotal figure in the history of prison theatre, embodying how performance can become, within the deprivation of freedom, an experience of knowledge and inner liberation.

In Spoleto, this legacy intersects with a specific history. In 1982, Marco Gagliardo staged Genet’s Deathwatch at the Rocca Albornoziana, newly freed from its former function as a prison, together with five inmates from Rebibbia prison. From that gesture emerged a trajectory that the work of #SIneNOmine — present at the Festival dei Due Mondi since 2013 — continues to explore.

In this performance, the characters gradually lose their names. They become the Nameless, entering into direct dialogue with the identity of the company itself. This is not an erasure, but a subtraction from immediate judgment, from biography reduced to a case file, from the person reduced to a number. The Nameless are bodies, memories, voices, presences.

The audience moves through a landscape of fragments: words drawn at random, letters from outside, diaries, empty chairs, silhouettes, distorted games, humble objects, remnants of ordinary lives. At its centre lies not the representation of prison, but its memory: what remains inscribed in bodies, in desires, in absence, in irony, in the stubborn need to still be seen as human beings.

The number 27 opens a double threshold: it looks toward the future while also invoking Article 27 of the Italian Constitution, where punishment cannot become annihilation, but must preserve the possibility of transformation. Not consolation. Not resolution. But a minimal and necessary gesture: to make memory, to make theatre, to make voice, to make a provisional community. To remain within another person’s time. To lose count.

To begin again.