Theater: “Nunzio” of Spiro Scimone on stage in Algiers

A play called « Nunzio » by the Sicilian Spiro Scimone, will be performed on April 28 at the Salle El Mouggar in Algiers.

 The play will be performed in French, with the translation of Jean-Paule Manganaro and will be directed by Marcello Scuderi, who leads one of the two main roles.

 The play, which is being staged in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in Algiers and Algeria’s National Culture and Information Department, tells the story of Nunzio (played by Andrea De Luca) and Pino (Marcello Scuderi) and is set during a hot summer in modern Sicily.

 Pino goes on mysterious trips abroad, where he earns large sums of money working for shady figures, while Nunzio, with whom he shares a flat, is a more naïve character, who awaits his friend at home, sick and with a head full of exotic dreams.

 The dialogue and the silence bring out the vastly differing personalities of the two men, while the relationship that links them is shrouded in mystery.

The film “Two Friends”, which won the prize for Best Debut Film at the 2002 Venice Festival, is adapted from the play, which was written in 1994.

After the play was performed in Paris in 2009, one critic wrote that “with the Sicilian Spiro Scimone, we are some distance from the picturesque and stereotyped demonstrativeness of the Latin man”.