WRITER - "THEODORUS"

"THEODORUS"

un atto di

GIORGIO QUINTINI

"The living are just a rare species of the dead...The living, I think, are larvae of the dead - dead bodies at an early stage of development."

Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque.

The quotation is from McGrath's 1989 Gothic novel and Giorgio Quintini used it, in Italian, as an epigraph at the head of the typescript of his play Theodorus, which he wrote in a period of upheaval and change in his own life. It is a  fitting opening to a somewhat gloomy text, in which the author draws upon his own dark side to resuscitate the shade of the first Paleologo Marquis of Monferrato, Teodoro (1290-1338) and his life and death in the Byzantium and Piedmont of the Medieval period.  It tells the story of his mother's being uprooted from Piedmont and carried to Constantinople and his own exile from Byzantium in cold and gloomy Monferrato.

(GQP archive)

Giorgio had recently left the city of his birth, the Caput Mundi of Rome, where he had lived most of his life, for permanent residence in Ovada, a small town in Monferrato. He was in his sixties and knew he was not going to return to Rome except for short breaks there. He was in exile himself and had to find himself a new role. This monologue helped him to do so.

It also helped him to establish local standing as a member of the once rulers of the region, the Paleologo family, descended from the rulers of Byzantium (themselves to become the last Christian dynasty of Constantinople before it was rudely conquered by the marauding Muslim army of Sultan Mehmed II in 1453).

The play was first "performed", in so far as Giorgio read it to original music by Marco Marchelli, in Ovada on 11th April 2003. This was at the local art association called "Due sotto l'ombrello".

Shortly afterwards the whole text was published as Giorgio's debut in URBS, the journal of the Accademia Urbensis of Ovada. It contained a very brief biographical paragraph on the author and the background to the monologue. It is available online at the following web address:

 http://accademiaurbense.it/pdf/URBS_06-03.pdf

The opening of the published version in URBS.

The opening page of Giorgio's original typescript of Theodorus

Such a success was this that Giorgio was invited to give a repeat performance in September of the same year at Villa Elvira in Silvano d'Orba, near Ovada.

In 2007 he was invited to the prestigious Villa Spinola in Genoa by the "Inner Wheel" association to read his monologue again. Here is the account of the event in their newsletter, which contains the opening paragraphs to the URBS publication, explaining the background to the work. It also has Giorgio as the last descendant of the Paleologo di Monferrato, which was not exactly true as the male line continues in the cadet branch of his Paleologo Oriundi cousins.

In fact it is not difficult to imagine Giorgio looking back on his own past as he struggled with his new life in Monferrato. The character of his Theodorus much reflects his own, as is clear from the ending here in the final page of his typescript. However, though the dark side probably remained with him, Theodorus had given him an opening into the local literary and social world of his new home and he was able to branch out into more historical works about his "family". Here is the final page of the typescript of the monologue.

The opening lines of this last page might be describing the magnificent view of the Castello di Lercaro, near Ovada, which, although much a ruin, has one wing devoted to a home for old people, which is where Giorgio ended his days. The ending of his monologue is almost prophetic.

Castello di Lercaro, Ovada.