The head-on confrontation between two queens: the Scot Mary Stuart and her cousin Elizabeth of England, the former a prisoner of the latter. In this drama written by Friedrich Schiller in the late 1700s, the struggle for the crown turns into a passionate clash, played out on different emotional levels (from envy and martyrdom, to insult and prayer). A ferocious battle that would determine the future fate not only of England but of Europe and the world.

Germanist Paolo Chiarini noted that in the theatre of Schiller, politics appear as a phenomenology of human destiny. It is certainly from here that Davide Livermore is prompted to set out, focusing on the relationship between womanhood and power: “In facing these two gigantic figures, we cannot help but wonder how much and how women have had to internalise certain male mechanisms of dealing with power.”

In the spotlight are two extraordinary actresses Laura Marinoni and Elisabetta Pozzi, who will be exchanging roles from night to night. “Who will be Mary and who Elizabeth? I imagine an initial moment of ritual, a robing that will be a great prologue, cathartic, to be done together with the audience. The two performers will only know at the last minute which character they must impersonate.

A virtuoso role-playing to reveal how fundamentally the two opposites are one and the same, how this gory duality is nothing but a reflection of Sameness. Mary’s counterpart thus becomes Elizabeth who embodies all the masculine methods of reigning and surviving. My theatre is rooted in the relationship with harmony at the service of the poetry of Monteverdian memory. The spoken word and the intoned word will always be supported by a sonorous exploration that begins with the voice of the actresses themselves’.