Roberto Rossellini e il teatro: un matrimonio d'interesse?

In the most difficult years of his arduous relationship with the Italian cinema milieu, Roberto Rossellini approached the theatre. From this viewpoint, Rossellini's theatrical forays between the early 1950s and the early 1960s – that is, in a moment of great economic difficulty – risk to appear under the equivocal light of the marriage of interest. Yet, being Rossellini a director who, despite appearances, has never done anything that was truly only in his own interest, one has to wonder whether this light is not a mistake. One thing is certain: if on the one hand the theatre directions of these years represent for Rossellini a breath of fresh air from an economic point of view, it is equally true that they allow him to escape from an increasingly hostile cinematographic environment and to dive in with satisfaction in another world, where the welcome immediately proved to be more benevolent and in any case free from the prejudices that had plagued him in cinema milieu since the end of the 1940s.