"Fantastica Visione" di Giuliano Scabia e le comprensione alternative del "reale"

The fantastic can be a way to conceal reality but also to reveal it, to offer a new understanding of it, alternative to the 'official' one. This is what happens in "Fantastica Visione", a play by Giuliano Scabia written in 1973. Scabia represents the hallucinating and delirious version of a medieval mystery, where the unknown and the inexplicable are the only keys to interpret reality. This essay aims to explore how, in Scabia's drama, accepting the fantastic allows us to understand the world again. The narrative itself takes on the forms of the fantastic it represents, continually alternating between dreams, visions and meta-theatrical puppet shows. The plot of the play has at its centre the butcher of a small town, a sort of devil-man, who, in order to deal with a cattle epidemic, starts to kill the inhabitants of the town and sell their meat. The butcher, as the author of the murders, is the only one who does not have to choose the fantastic as a way of explaining reality, which is instead the only way the other characters can cope with the absurdity they are experiencing. They are forced to accept the inexplicable and incorporate it into their understanding of the world, so that it can continue - return - to make sense. The characters are subjected to continuous metamorphoses and transformations that change their relationship with reality and shift it into a horrific and frightening fantasy, with gothic features and inhabited by ghosts, spirits and devils who are, however, direct emanations of the fears and horrors of twentieth-century modernity. Topics and forms of the fantastic in Scabia’s play will be the core of the essay.