Anno: 1989

Histoire du Soldat is a text created as an “opera for actor, music and dance”. The magical atmospheres aroused by Ramuz’s text (and Afanasiev’s fairy tales) and Stravinsky’s essential and modern music seemed to us an incredibly fertile material for our way of making theatre.

Of great importance is the favour and interest with which the Ente Lirico Arena di Verona, one of the most prestigious musical institutions in our country, has welcomed the idea and the project, thus opening the activity of the institution to a new public.

We also underline the variety and importance of the artistic collaborations that have gathered around the show, a real “laboratory” for actors, musicians, scholars of the city, which offers a wide range of young and qualified presences. This edition of Histoire du Soldat was created by a team of young artists, in line with the role that our theatre wants to play in Verona’s cultural fabric.

Histoire du Soldat was first staged in Verona in 1989.

Dickens’s Christmas Carol like Collodi’s Pinocchio, Malot’s Nobody’s Boy, Twain’s Tom Sawyer or Molnar’s The Paul Street Boys: a childhood classic. The path to virtue, in literature, is paved with boredom, and young readers are potentially all Gianburrasca who do not like sermons: this is the reason why Pinocchio remains at the time better, for example, than Cuore by De Amicis. But Dickens was a pleasant moralist; he knew how to show us human fears and human repentance of his characters – even the negative ones like Scrooge. Moreover, he was able to squeeze out a few tears of emotion, and did not renounce to capture the comic sides of life, with that indulgent pity that comes from knowing the secrets of the heart. (…)

Of this classic, I intended to make a new “free” and “updated” adaptation. In the sense that I intend  to project in today’s world, as it is, the story of the old usurer who, in the end, repented: so that The Christmas Carol would not be – or would not be only, as it could have become – an old picture book about London, (…) but would succeed in stimulating – in this case in the audience of very young people to whom the show is destined (…) some considerations on the world in which we live”.

Ugo Ronfani

Author of this “updated” theatrical version of A Christmas Carol dedicated to children and young people, has been a journalist, writer and teacher as well as theatre and literary critic of “Il giorno”, of which he was also vice-director.  He founded and directed the magazine of theatre and entertainment “Hystrio”.