FringeReview UK 2026
Teatro dei Gordi: Visite
Teatro dei Gordi and The Coronet Theatre
Genre: Absurd Theatre, Adaptation, Comedic, Commedia dell'Arte, Contemporary, Drama, European Theatre, International, Mainstream Theatre, Mask, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: The Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Three weeks of shows as two Italian companies return to Notting Hill’s Coronet. After Lacasadargilla’s fortnight of two works, Milan’s Teatro dei Gordi return after their extraordinary near-silent Pandora last year, set in a public toilet; with Visite. Which is set in a bedroom then care home. And the latter involves masks. And an escape. Directed by Riccardo Pippa it runs at The Coronet Theatre till May 16.
As ever, the Coronet and its guests have scored something unique in the British theatre-world.
Review
Three weeks of shows as two Italian companies return to Notting Hill’s Coronet. After Lacasadargilla’s fortnight of two works, Milan’s Teatro dei Gordi return after their extraordinary near-silent Pandora last year, set in a public toilet; with Visite. Which is set in a bedroom then care home. The latter involves masks. And an escape. Directed by Riccardo Pippa it runs at The Coronet Theatre till May 16.
At one point a woman in an aged mask asks a care assistant to read in Italian and English. It adds nothing and everything. It could have been about flower-arranging. The existential howl would have been the same. Those who remember Pandora, with its six actors playing 48 characters in recurring scenarios, will also recall how clear-cut it was, how vivid the set.
Visite is different. The bedroom set, quite minimally arranged, takes up two-thirds of the narrative. A sudden reveal – tearing off a white backdrop cloth – to the larger-scaled rest home (still bare) only takes place in the last twenty minutes; with masks. The latter’s a lucid, if occasionally alien world. There’s a strange swap of slippers. Everything’s tight and gesture behind the masks is vestigial, sad and comedic. The 40 minutes preceding it – the dynamic, playful, sexy, group-sexy and narratively fluid world of that single bedroom – is one of intimacy, ritual and belonging.
Six actors multi-role – though it’s not quite as if these roles are less than fluid and chimerical. Ceclia Campani, Giovanni Longhin, Andrea Panigatti, Sandro Pivotti, Maria Vittoria Scarlattei, Mateo Vitanza all dance to the music of time, though Campani and Scarlattei do much of the heavy identity-lifting. A sexually playful couple, who might be from the 1960s, flirt around the bedroom, joined by their neighbours, alter-egos, previous or even future or fantasy partners perhaps. This isn’t confined to the sexual. Unlike Pandora, the gestural moments meld into one another: there’s not discrete scenes so much as a gallimaufry of emotions: as if the emotions themselves are seeking out bodies.
With Ilaria Arienne’s masks and costumes – people are encouraged to pick them up at the end – we enter a world of commedia-del-arte in a retirement home. Before that though there’s much contrast of youth and age, and clothing suggesting earlier decades, and timelessness. Against this a kind of dolce vita soundtrack plays, and Luca de Marinis’s sound design has latterly picked out with a kind of deadly accuracy the sort of music used in a rest home or hospital; and Italian Classic fm (rather superior to the British one): From J Strauss, Couperin, early Italian baroque violin and a Tchaikowsky waltz. Pabalo Castai’s lighting is steady in the second scene: strips of municipal if soft neon. In the first though there’s chiaroscuro, and the scent of evening too. Wedded earlier to a trajectory not always easy to follow – and that’s the point. It’s endlessly teasing, worth seeing twice.
The crisper and briefer narrative seems like a fast-forward for those characters seen earlier and from an earlier time: as if the gurneys loom for us all perhaps. Though in a not unkindly slow-motion ballet of older people in masks visiting each other across the room. They’re being tended, sometimes very gently, by carers or nurses: one of whom reads out for one of the two women (difficult to tell if it’s Campani or Scarlattei, but they’re dominant here). At one moment a visiting man mimics driving a train with sound-effects, pulling away (but not) from the bed. There’s a surprise visit from another older woman towards the end, who effects something exhilarating.
Metaphors flicker, and pulsate with every kind of meaning. Teatro Dei Gordi on the evidence of the two plays I’ve seen though, bases its absurd and bizarre effects on life observed, not absurdism per se. Everything’s managed with both humour and deadpan seriousness, fun and the obliquity of living and understanding each other. If it doesn’t quite come over as Pandora did, it sinks profound roots in its 70 minutes. And is worth any amount of normative fare in the West End. As ever, the Coronet and its guests have scored something unique in the British theatre-world.
Dramaturg Giulia Tollis, Scenography Anna Maddelena Cingi, Audio-lighting Technician Alice Colla, Assistant Director Daniele Cavone Felicione. Production: Teatro Franco Parenti.
