The Nobel Prize committee described Kazuo Ishiguro’s work as possessing “novels of great emotional force,” a power born from his exploration of human feelings, narrated with delicacy. His stories engage and move readers, gradually revealing how love forms and transforms relationships, even between servants and masters, as in the masterpiece ‘The Remains of the Day’. Focusing on this very intensity of writing and words, Lacasadargilla is now staging ‘Klara and the Sun’ with an excellent cast, directed by Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni, and adapted by Roberto Scarpetti.
The production is part of the ‘IF/Invasioni (dal) Futuro Legacy 2025’ festival at Rome’s Teatro India, running through August 31st.
“This multidisciplinary project,” explain the organizers, “is dedicated to science fiction writings and themes in dialogue with our present, to reveal its hidden folds and help us discover that the world, as we know it, is ultimately a falsehood. The idea is that science fiction, by suspending the traditional criterion of verisimilitude, generates a fracture in reality, a sort of ‘negative recognition’ as Philip K. Dick defined it: an estrangement that shows us what is already happening in the opaque heart of our time.”
The play tackles the isolation and loneliness to which the web leads us and our relationship with the virtual, which is increasingly and disturbingly seeking to acquire the characteristics of the real and the human.
Here, the protagonist is Klara, an AF (Artificial Friend), a state-of-the-art robot that affluent families buy to keep their children company. These children are increasingly isolated at home, doing everything remotely. She is purchased for Josie, a genetically enhanced teenager—a process that has, however, caused her severe health problems (her sister previously died from the same procedure).
Klara, who has a particular sensitivity and capacity for observation, acquires increasing empathy, humanizing herself to levels we will not reveal for those unfamiliar with how Ishiguro’s story ends.
The performance eschews simple dramatized reading. Klara, played excellently by Petra Valentini, stands at a lectern, delivering her lines with robotic rhythm but never coldness. Other characters also use lecterns, while some, like Josie (a truthful Cecilia Fabris) and her friend Rick (Edoardo Sabato), perform from memory. Together, they render the novel’s subtle emotions and the development and intertwining of feelings with theatrical involvement. In one exemplary moment, Josie’s mother confesses her attempt to avoid feelings to defend herself from life’s pains, while Klara is built to constantly seek to increase her own sensitivity.
This approach results in little physical action, with expressive force residing entirely in the dialogues. Characters move on a stage split in two by depth, with veils serving as transparent wings or projection screens, behind which the entire cast and a musician creating ambient music and echoes with a synthesizer are always visible.
The ‘IF/Invasioni (dal) Futuro Legacy 2025’ festival at Teatro India opened on August 26th. The program includes the performance ‘Captcha,’ which plays with the Alan Turing test, challenging the audience to distinguish between a human actor and a machine. On August 28th and 29th, the national premiere of ‘The Swastika of the Sun’ by Philip K. Dick imagines a world where Germany and Japan won the war, questioning reality within a totalitarian society. On August 30th and 31st, a new version of Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner)’ is set in a post-atomic metropolis where factories produce incredibly realistic synthetic humans.
Each day at dusk, the site-specific multimedia installation ‘The Kipple’s Chronicles’ transforms the theater’s exterior wall into a membrane of images, transporting the audience into the atmosphere of the upcoming shows. The festival also features conferences, workshops, choral sound works, live broadcasts by Radio IF, and a pop-up bookstore with rare editions of classic and contemporary science fiction.