FringeReview UK 2026
Uccelini
Lacasadargilla
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, European Theatre, International, Magical Realism, Mainstream Theatre, Multimedia, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: The Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Rosalinda Conti Uccelini or Little Birds teases with its filmic properties, projections, voiceover and chirpings-off. Over 90 minutes it burns with a small green flame. Directed by Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni it runs at The Coronet Theatre till May 2.
A rich, suggestive and above all probing work about how we live with our ghosts so we can live with each other
Review
Are there bears in the woods? Or are all the creatures birds? It sounds comedic: this is spookier. There’s a touch of Sam Shepherd’s True West. There, two rival brothers clash: one a city screenwriter, one a machismo misanthrope dwelling out west who thinks he can write scripts. Only here it’s the latter, Theo, who writes famous books. Here too everything is liminal, even as we swoop down at the opening projection through treetops and trees. Rosalinda Conti’s Uccelini or Little Birds teases with its filmic properties, projections, voiceover and chirpings-off. Over 90 minutes it burns with a small green flame. Directed by Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni it runs at The Coronet Theatre till May 2.
A project by lacasadargilla who brought Caryl Churchill’s Heart’s Desire in Italian translation here in 2024, it’s the first of two productions they’re bringing to the Coronet. Churchill’s Escaped Alone plays next week and already looks sold out. It’s an ongoing relationship with Italian companies the Coronet has enjoyed recently. After lacasadargilla the very different and usually silent Teatro dei Gordi who enchanted last year, return with Visite.
Recent prize-winner Rosalinda Conti is on this evidence an exciting voice just getting into her stride. Perhaps the eerie arrives when Luca’s girlfriend Anna can quote Theo (a brooding, sometimes dangerous Emiliano Masala). It unnerves then engages the seemingly misanthropic brother, who’s returned to the family’s abandoned house to write. But in reality it seems he’s searching for his dead sister Matilda’s psyche.
Luca, in Francesco Villano’s evasive, alternately gruff and urbane reading, the good-time enjoyer of city-life, is holding back. He’s not been with Anna long; there’s questions about when people should ask each other questions when they get together. In this case Anna, whose birthday it becomes at midnight, has a horror of birds. There’s dead birds stuffed all around. One even changes position. How could Luca anticipate Anna’s fears? Even here though, the eerie is not always malevolent
Petra Valentini realises Anna as both repelled by the oppressive dark, but at the same time drawn. She can quote Luca, but in Valentini’s hands also shows a joyous dance-like side as Theo even pops on pop classics mostly known in the UK. Anna shifts throughout: indeed if Luca seems an agent, he’s more a catalyst for changing the quiddity of his brother’s brooding, and Anna’s true desires. If Shepherd suggests the men, Pinter’s The Homecoming pre-echoes Anna. The rest is almost Ibsen, but without Ibsen’s ratcheting-up.
A play about presence, absence and the curious immanence of the unquiet dead, this is a work that broods its way often compellingly as story, without feeling like a drama bent on happening. I’m reminded of European work, like the Danish The Hunt, both as film and its Almeida dramatization: but even here things decidedly happen. Uccelini, with the climax a slow dawn, nudging a decision we’re not sure will happen, is nearer one of those slow finales in an Annie Baker play, like The Flick or John. These are pointers merely.
It’s clear a slow volte-face might emerge, but when? The tease in this play suggests events have taken place long in the past, and will be just ahead. We’re treated to a simmering. If at one (and not too literal) level this is the realm of the dead who might be narrating, then it seems a watchful if benign one. At other points the very stasis of grieving is the point of being tethered to your own grave, or someone else’s, and circling it. That of people stuck in roles because they’ve not laid their experience to rest – or indeed don’t know what it is.
Luca has seen terrible things. Theo, who missed these events, thinks he’s not telling the truth about Theo’s twin sister Matilda’s death. Or enough about their father’s suicide. We’re told in flashes some bald facts, but is this what detains them? The drama, playing softly, resolves in whiteish images of animals, and the sound of invisible birds.
Performed in Italian, the surtitles are exemplary and discreet. Alessandro Ferroni’s soundscapes and scenic concept craft a greenish envelope and Marco Rossi’s and Francesca Sgariboldi’s set is detailed: a neglected but authentic country kitchen with bric-a-brac, where a transparent screen interposes between it and an open downstage. Actors emerge, indeed occasionally come within inches of the front row much like the Wooster Group last week. Anna Missaglia’s costumes give relatively little away. Except in the quiet exuberance and independence of Anna’s trouser suit.
Mostly though it’s a slightly recessed affair. Maddalena Parise’s visual environment seems responsible for a video projection, prominent at the opening and close, but intermittently present, swooping down and through woods; where we speed through greenery, ending in the heart of bottle-greenness. Omar Scala’s lighting both enables this and occludes the interior on occasion, so deploying optical refractions the transparent screen affords. The frangible wood jumps into the kitchen. It’s quietly bewitching.
That’s not all that jumps in, as spectral things ghost across. Pasquale Citera’s sound alternates between voiceovers, perhaps Matilda’s, and perhaps something else; and bursts of music that seem like the radio itself whistling in the dark.
This will madden some, and absorb others. It does draw on a little too slowly and the material is sometimes stretched. It feels like an 80-minute piece, with one or two elements that need sharing. Nevertheless it’s a rich, suggestive and above all probing work about how we live with our ghosts so we can live with each other.
Artistic coordination for the project: Alice Palazzi, Assistant director: Angelica Azzellini, Translator: Margherita Mauro
Shadow projection in collaboration with: Malombra, Production photographs: Claudia Pajewski.
Production: La Fabbrica dell’Attore / Teatro Vascello.
In co-production with: Romaeuropa Festival, Piccolo Teatro di Milano – Teatro d’Europa.
In collaboration with: AMAT & City of Pesaro, lacasadargilla, PAV Fabulamundi, Playwriting Europe, RAM – Residenze Artistiche Marchigiane.
With the support of: The Italian Institute of Culture in London, ATCL / Spazio Rossellini, Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and of Idra Teatro / Wonderland Festival.
