The prophecy of environmental disaster in Giuseppe Fava’s political theatre: Paradigma

An exemplary scientific experiment: a man who died on June 16, 1969, hibernated and remained intact, with within him the “thoughts, moral defects, ideas that have almost disappeared in the modern world”. He is awakened in a laboratory, next to other human beings who perhaps pretend to be the characters in the drama, in a micro-society, such as that of Southern Italy in the eighties, now polluted, corrupt and prey to the violence of the mafia. This is the artistic intuition of the Sicilian playwright and journalist Giuseppe Fava (1925-1984): to immerse a man from another era in a contemporary ecosystem, in which technology is decisive, feelings are less and less present and the danger of contagion of living beings with new viruses that bring unknown epidemics is real. The man of the South lives in an environment polluted by the poisons emitted by the chimneys that stand out along the Sicilian maritime coast; it lives without justice for the weakest forced to work hardest in the countryside or in the mines, in unhealthy conditions that cause deadly diseases, and to emigrate to Northern Europe.