Amleto Take Away
(Hamlet Take-Out)

And Berardi is among the few actors of his generation who carry on the heroic tradition of the actor-author of the new Italian theater: taking the classics, tearing them to pieces, eating them and then spitting them out, more alive than ever. Among the direct references there are of course two giants: Carmelo Bene and ,in particular, Leo de Berardinis.

He is Gianfranco Berardi, a volcano of energy, Apulian fire in his veins, capable of roars, acrobatics, metamorphosis of voices and roles, captivating comedy and melancholic tenderness. […] Seeing him on stage is an overwhelming experience because he has the power of a magnet. Each movement is calibrated, but offered with extreme lightness: alongside Berardi there is the visible but discreet presence of Casolari, a sort of stage servant or "guardian" who hands over the objects, directs him, suggests pauses and movements. A delicate figure that acts as a counterpoint to Berardi's muscular energy.

This new opera by the Berardi-Casolari Company is a great little pearl of theatre. Which goes from prose to parody of everyday life and creeps into poetry that can preserve life in its image of beauty.

The play is certainly the most mature of Gianfranco Berardi's latest productions. There’s the harmonic presence of Gabriella Casolari, work and life partner, here in the humble but fundamental role of sidekick, almost a stage servant, who allows Gianfranco to go on reckless, pyrotechnic displays, incredible for an artist suffering from blindness - moreover declared and told during the show – that the neophyte spectator is led to consider a dramaturgical fiction.

Berardi on stage is a rocker, he is both blessed and cursed, he is Iggy Pop and Dino Campana, he is Michael Jackson and Bukowsky, he is Michael Jordan and Baudelaire, he is Jim Morrison and Basquiat. We could dare to name Carmelo Bene as well [...]. If Berardi is the front man in this new work, Casolari is, more than the stage servant who moves lights and objects, the Kantorian director who activates the devices, gives pauses, directs looks and parentheses, he suggests with small touches. The duo coincides, the duet works, amalgamated over the years, well mixed. In their words there is a dense tender ferocity and a candid cruel delicacy…

Berardi-Casolari's theater is physical, as well as an unstoppable and engaging flow of words; it is a head-word-heart movement that does not stop, which makes the scenic objects one with the protagonist, becoming tools for travel, storytelling, rest and reflection; it is a dream of a possible world to build that intersects with the real one, dominated by appearances, by the media, by social networks, by love relationships that are built through virtuality.

Gianfranco Berardi takes a rather unprecedented poetic path and with Amleto Take Away he forges a very close creative relationship with Gabriella Casolari. In his Christ scattered with a methodic madness we discover a mature Berardi who, as a visually impaired, seems to evoke Montale praising the guide of her eyes.

With Amleto take away, intended as ordering a “Take-out Hamlet”, written and interpreted by a wild Gianfranco Berardi, assisted, guided and pampered by his Gabriella Casolari, one has the impression of taking an acrobatic ride on a roller coaster so you have to hold on tightly so as not to fall down. You feel your heart leap into your throat when you see him enter the scene holding himself tied like a Christ to a red curtain…

The very successful Amleto take away by the Berardi-Casolari company, which sees, as often happens, Gianfranco Berardi alone on stage to evoke with a large dose of irony the contradictions of our time, affected by speed and all stretched out on the surface. Assisted by the co-author Gabriella Casolari, also a presence on stage... Between moments of obvious and self-deprecating comedy and others of more incisive examination of our times, the play runs towards the end with a light and guessed rhythm, under which lurks more than one fundamental question…

Berardi/Casolari’s Hamlet overturns all the diktats of our time, in a semi-serious game of continuous reversal. Gabriella Casolari is an almost hieratic presence, with her liturgy of minimal movements, modulated in the shadows, [...] and Berardi is a war machine of prayer, with his agile physique, tense nerves and a voice that chews words high intensity, and then tears them up, swallows them, spits them out, in a ritual of sharing with the public. Letting go of heart and lungs, without safety.

A rare dramaturgical writing, wave-like, and a consistency that is never fully grasped, which only some actors and actresses have.