A truly special event is coming to Casa Saddi for the Mondo Eco literary festival: “JERRU, aka SCROOGE,” a free theatrical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” on December 19th at 5:00 pm.
The show is written and directed by Giampietro Orrù, and features Dario Piras, Anna Herres, and Emanuela Orrù (musical arrangements), with technical assistance from Rossano Orrù and Gianni Melis Maura Grussu (costumes).
A literary festival explores the world of books, including through its staging. Furthermore, the theme of sustainability must be addressed, as history suggests, especially during the holidays, banning consumption and the rush for gifts that will later lead to pollution, and rediscovering the true meaning of Christmas.
Scrooge, the antihero Charles Dickens chose as the protagonist of his A Christmas Carol, becomes Loi Susuncu – Salvatore the Miser in our free adaptation. Loi’s character is quite similar in characteristics to well-known and lesser-known misers from theatrical and popular tradition. In our case, he is a “mask” that brings together two otherwise distant worlds: that of England during the first industrial revolution, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the world of rural Sardinia. Social criticism and the merciless depiction of avarice are placed in a fairytale dimension outside of the immediate historical context; Jerru (Winter), the title of the bilingual Sardinian-Italian adaptation, is the natural result. The linguistic choice of Sardinian is not based on vernacular-prosaic language, but rather on that of traditional poets. The staging unfolds through the performances of just three actors, a synthesis of characters and situations from Dickens’s crowded tale, who have worked with flexibility using essential, therefore meaningful and poetically evocative, means.
It’s late at night. An elderly man returns home and seeks shelter from the cold by wrapping himself in a worn military blanket. He falls asleep. The man is not a poor man with nothing to keep warm, a bed to sleep in, or money to eat, but a miserly, merciless rich man, both with himself and others, willing to subject others to the cruelest privations and oppressions. Even though it’s Christmas Eve, he doesn’t want to hear about holidays, much less Christmas. But the night is long, and it’s hard to cope with the anxieties that torment him: two ghosts, a veritable nemesis personified, make Loi Susuncu’s Christmas Eve, to say the least, singular…
