Alle origini del teatro wilcockiano: Los traidores

Los traidores is Juan Rodolfo Wilcock’s first play, written in Spanish with Silvina Ocampo and published in 1956 in Buenos Aires. The play deals with a subject of Roman history: the conspiracies and intrigues in late imperial Rome between the deaths of Septimius Severus and Caracalla. The paper reconstructs the development phase of the work, to be traced back to the late 1940s, through the testimonies of the critic Ernesto Schoo, a friend of Wilcock and Ocampo and witness of some attempts to represent the drama at Silvina’s house. Later reference is made to the Italian rewriting of the work, published by Wilcock in 1962 with the title Giulia Domna, briefly analyzing the main differences between the two texts in relation to the different contexts of arrival. Finally, the main characteristics of Los traidores are examined: the theme of conspiracy and that of fiction, the metaliterary component, the parody, the mixture between the tragic and the comic and between historical drama and fantastic elements. In this way Los traidores connects to the Argentine literary context and carries within it some of the main characteristics of the Wilcock’s poetics developed in the works of the Italian period.