Capossela, Capovilla, a dead friend and a ‘drama for voices’ by Dylan Thomas

Renato Striglia used to pretend to be a bodyguard for the sake of the show. When Vinicio Capossela would launch into ‘Bodyguard’, he – a rock ’n’ roll DJ from Turin, ‘guardian devil and travelling companion’, as Capossela calls him – would climb onto the stage dressed as a ‘gorilla’ (dark glasses, jacket and tie), and stand there with his arms crossed. It was 1996, during the ‘Ballo di San Vito’ tour, and the producer, rather than hire a car for those two months, had bought one: a maroon BMW, a proper tough guy’s car, the sort they don’t make anymore. Renato took it over, paying for it in instalments, and it became his pride and joy. Until one day he decided to set off for India, for a wedding that never took place – Capossela was supposed to be his best man: the bride had promised to bring Keith Richards! – and where he would have started trading in old fans and making shirts under the René Turin label with the slogan ‘Fashion for losers’. He was so late that day that he didn’t even think of taking a taxi: he drove to the airport in the BMW and left it there. They towed it away. When he returned to Italy, he didn’t even have a car to get home. “He must have made about a hundred of those shirts,” says Capossela. “The yield was poor, but they’re precious to all of us. I wear it when I need to become invincible.”

“René” Striglia died in 2020. For years he had been working on an Italian translation of “Under Milk Wood”, the radio play written by Dylan Thomas and broadcast by the BBC in January 1954, two months after the death of the Welsh poet, a rock star before rock and roll. Renato never finished it, but he had already decided that the two narrators would be Capossela and Paolo Rossi. The radio play was eventually broadcast in May on Radio 3. From that umpteenth interrupted “music project” also emerged “E Morte non avrà dominio”, Capossela’s first ballad opera – the stray patron of the defeated, guardian of festivals and ghosts, who this time takes on the role of theatre director and innkeeper of a village that does not exist. Produced by Imarts in collaboration with the Fondazione Teatro Due in Parma and La Cùpa, it made its debut at the Teatro Olimpico as part of the Romaeuropa Festival and will remain on tour until 21 December. Then that’s it: just one season, “an apparition, an event destined to vanish”, explains Vinicio. “I wouldn’t have known Dylan Thomas if it hadn’t been for Renato. I’ve tried to do something he wanted to do, something I didn’t pay attention to when I still had time to give him a hand. I’m living someone else’s dream.”

Their whimsical friendship is set in Turin in the mid-1990s, which, for Capossela, was the best place to discover new music, with Giancarlo’s DJ booth at the Murazzi, the epicentre of it all. Renato came from radio: in the 1980s, alongside Alberto Campo, he had brought new wave to the nights of the ‘factory city’. Renato wasn’t just the (fake and extremely elegant) gorilla on stage: he was the one who wrote about the album, who introduced Capossela to his audience – part tour manager, part one of the friends who ended up in his songs. On tour they shared a room: Renato would spend hours on the phone, then fall asleep with a lit cigarette and burn the sheets, which the hotels had to be reimbursed for. And then there was Torino FC, the Maratona stand: an existential condition, says Vinicio, who dedicates Chinaski’s line to him: “Winners don’t know what they’re missing”. This summer, the “bodyguard” song has made a comeback, reworked together with Pierpaolo Capovilla, lead singer of Teatro degli Orrori and, as of this year, an actor nominated for a David di Donatello award for Francesco Sossai’s Le città di pianura. Renato’s place has been filled once more. And his dream takes shape out of the darkness.

Let’s return to the theatre. Because at the centre of the stage is a bath, and Capovilla himself is inside it. He is three people rolled into one: ‘I’m a bit like Dylan Thomas, a bit like Capitan Gatto and a bit like Renato too,’ he says. Capitan Gatto is the old blind sailor from Llareggub, the seaside village invented by Thomas, whose name, when read backwards, sounds like a swear word in English. The idiomatic meaning, however, is what Thomas’s joke revolves around: in those twenty-four hours in the little town, ‘absolutely nothing’ happens, whilst its inhabitants crowd round the bath. “Voices appear, animated songs, silhouettes of trees and musicians behind the tulle, opera singers, and fifteen new tracks, each with its own character, and every character with their own quirk, from the minute to the universal. On 22 January, those songs will, like butterflies, take their place on the cover of an album released by BMG: ‘Milk Wood Bar’,” explains Capossela. Some voices come from further afield: Capitan Gatto speaks with the voice of Daniel Melingo, the Argentine tango singer who died in June, and Signora Ciliegia with that of Ornella Vanoni. A show full of traces of the dead. “In this story, we never stop parting,” one hears at a certain point.

Capossela did not want to stage *Thomas*. He says he is not a playwright, and the production proves him right: rather than a story, it is a procession of apparitions, which those who have heard the radio play will recognise and others will accept on trust. “I was interested in a different story: what remains of a life that ends in a solitary room, until the world bursts in and clears that out too. In a society so focused on wealth, what we leave behind as a legacy are possessions, children, everything that can be quantified. But what does a person leave behind who has only a handful of objects, and a cat?” The true essence of existence, he told Il Foglio a few years ago, lies in things that are priceless. And why a bath, specifically, and not a bed, a sofa, or perhaps a coffin? “I’m a regular in the bath,” says Capossela, quoting the Drugo from The Big Lebowski, soaking whilst listening to the songs of the whales with a joint in his hand, and Napoleon, who took such long baths on Saint Helena that his skin became corroded. “It is the most extraordinary place for contemplation, and also for surrender. The bath on stage is made of tin. A migrant’s little boat, a tomb, but also a patched-up Noah’s Ark.” The ark comes from Thomas, from the prologue he wrote for his *Collected Poems* in his house on the Laugharne estuary: the poet transforms his home into an ark, imagines multitudes of arks saving the world, and in the end the flood, rather than destroying, brings forth new life.

So why Capovilla, then? The two did not know each other: they were brought together by Le città di pianura, the film that everyone has now seen: the story of two lost fifty-somethings waiting for a friend during a night that seems to go on forever. Male friendship also plays a part, which in Capossela’s life has always taken the same form: a mate “a bit bigger than me”, he says, “with more substance, more stability, more practical sense, and better advice on what to drink and what not to”. René was one of them. A friendship “transmuted into an epic”. Capossela and Capovilla explain it through the theory of ‘bad mentors’ – not those of the ‘Years of Lead’, but ‘intangible travelling companions, who are in fact the most real. Those encountered in books or on records, or at most in some late-night venue: from Bukowski to Willy DeVille, even Dylan Thomas himself, who kicked the bucket at thirty-nine after downing eighteen whiskies in a row. Things that make a legend, but leave people dead in their wake’. On stage, Capovilla/Renato turns this into a creed: you join the procession of losers with dignity, until it’s your turn to lead it. But to lose in style, you have to dress well, always be ready for the big occasions, even if they never come. Of that list, one stands out above the rest. Willy DeVille, the New York crooner of Latin serenades and pavements, is, alongside Tom Waits, one of Capossela’s avowed role models: the same blend of broken hearts set to the rhythm of the bolero, of joy that smacks of farewell, of melancholy and the stage. One night, Renato called his friend to recount a promise made years earlier with DeVille at the end of a concert: the American was a great lover of roses, and whichever of the two died first would receive from the other a silver rose on their grave (“crystal tears have bathed it”). DeVille passed away first; Striglia followed eleven years later. Two romantics of the same ilk.

This summer, we could have done with another one – a rose. On 6 August, the same day as DeVille but seventeen years later, Guccini passed away. Back in 1989, at the Tenco Prize, he had listened to a cassette by a young Capossela and introduced him to Renzo Fantini, his long-standing manager (the same man who, years later, would buy that famous BMW). “None of this would exist without Guccini,” Capossela recalls. In recent weeks, he has been listening again to “Odysseus”, one of the lesser-known songs of which the “maestrone” was most proud: an Odysseus with a peasant’s heart and Ithaca like Pavana, the home of his forefathers in the Apennines.

After all, the title also speaks of returns. It comes from a poem that Thomas wrote at the age of eighteen, which in turn draws on St Paul: in the Epistle to the Romans, it is the risen Christ over whom death no longer has dominion. On stage, however, it is interwoven with another of Thomas’s poems, which urges us not to go gently into that good night and to rage against the dying of the light. On stage there is an ark, an evening prayer, and in the bath a man named Pierpaolo – a tribute to Peter and Paul – the son of a Pauline novice who never took her vows and a father who wanted to become a priest. One is tempted to ask whether this is a play about the Resurrection. Capovilla is blunt. “I don’t believe in God, and He doesn’t believe in me either.” Yet he holds fast to Christianity, in his own way: “Pietas and brotherhood are my Christian heritage, which I shall never renounce. In solidarity, I must help you. In brotherhood, I must protect you, because you are a member of my family, of the human family.” Capossela: “Thomas was, in his own way, a religious poet, even if not a practising one, and on his deathbed he is said to have expressed a desire to return to the Garden of Eden, to remain unconscious forever. I, on the other hand, would like to overcome the fear of death, through the management of which every exercise of power passes. To say that death shall have no dominion is an almost childish principle of protest, a vital whim”. Resurrection, in short, does exist, but it is secular: the friend who lives on in the songs, the community that gathers round the bath. “Everything will be lost,” remarks Capossela. “But, as the poem says, not love.” It is Thomas’s line: ‘though lovers be lost, love shall not.’ Lovers will be lost, but not love. And death shall have no dominion.

Then there is an idea that Thomas abandoned and which Capossela has taken up. Initially, the work was to be called "The Town That Was Mad": a village collectively declared mad and fenced off by the authorities, whose inhabitants, locked inside, end up faring much better than those outside: it is the world that is mad. In Under Milk Wood the fence disappears; in the play it returns: the room around the bath is the village; outside lies the world we know. Capossela turns it into a ‘good’ fence. One might object that a fence of innocence remains a fence, albeit a more likeable one, and he does not shy away from this: “You can put up a fence to lock people in, but also to protect them. When I think of a fence of humanity, I think of something I put up to protect what I love’. In Thomas’s play, there is an eighty-five-year-old woman, Mary Ann Sailors, who, upon waking, announces to the world that paradise on earth exists, and it is right there, beneath the bare hill of Llareggub. Capossela agrees with her: he reads ‘Fern Hill’, the childhood poem in which time lets the poet play, green and golden, before binding him in chains. And Capovilla, from the bath, retorts that only lovers – and death – can make the hands of the clock jam. After all, the village is not idealised. Llareggub belongs to a family of books about communities, from Spoon River to Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and the community “is by no means a paradise; on the contrary, it is a place of great internal confinement: everyone is defined by the role they play, and never escapes it. Pueblo chico, infierno grande. Llareggub is its gentler, less severe version”. The opposite is Lars von Trier’s Dogville: a few houses sketched in chalk in the dark, where one sees at work “the ferocity of the mechanisms of the small world. After all,” says Capossela, “childhood, so often celebrated, is also one of the cruellest seasons of human life”.

“Under Milk Wood” begins in the dark, on a moonless night, and is theatre for the ear; sight is not a factor. Capossela, who had long contemplated a grand “mutiny” – staging the entire performance in complete darkness – ultimately opted for “the physicality of the bodies”, but it still begins there. “Darkness is the fertile ground of creation. Black gives rise to all other colours. And our village is full of piquant details: the milk wood is precisely the place where one goes to hide away, to indulge one’s most intimate nature”. The show champions a list of ‘things that have fallen into disuse’: the beautiful losers of rock ’n’ roll, the epic of failure, a certain feline anarchism. Darkness, too, is, after all, something that has fallen into disuse: at concerts and elsewhere. ‘They may well be in disuse,’ says Vinicio. ‘But if you use them, they work perfectly well.’

At the Olimpico, he was applauded by an audience who know his songs before they’ve even heard them. The show is an act of love for a friend, and it asks to be reciprocated. After all, it all began with a rose. The first song he wrote, Capossela explains, was “Silver Rose”, about his deceased beloved who returns to speak to Capitan Gatto in his dreams. Once that was written, he had to write all the others. Renato took it upon himself to nurture the silver rose that was his to tend, and it withers in a single season: on 21 December, in Florence, the show comes to an end and will not return. The songs will go onto the album, the tub into storage. The lovers will be lost, but not love. Nor that shirt that makes one invincible.