On June 2, at the Don Tognolini parish hall in Castionetto, there was the premiere of Notte Tempo, the new theatrical production written and performed by Maurizio Zucchi and Pietro De Nova from the theater company Il Milione.

No, it wasn't a flop.
Sold out, an attentive and engaged audience, and many spontaneous applause 
A very successful show, full of rhythm, irony, and reflection. 

It's the kind of performance that makes you smile in the moment, but also think quite a bit when you get home.

And precisely because the central theme is information, the way it is made and told, the title of this article intended to tease.

The set design is simple (as is customary for Il Milione), made up of many sheets of old newspapers hanging on walls, on panels, with only the lighting of four LED lamps to be moved as needed...

Notte Tempo is a dive into the newsrooms of newspapers, the real, physical ones of the past, with typewriters, ringing telephones, journalists shouting at each other and running from morning till night to close the edition.

There's the frenzy of the news, the chase for the scoop, reading other newspapers for insights, the anxiety of the "piece" that has to come out before the others.
And then there's printing, distribution, piles of unsold newspapers ending up in warehouses. All that huge machinery revolving around information, which too often forgets about the content, the ethics, the true essence of storytelling.

And here Pasolini also makes an entrance.

Yes, because the show is explicitly inspired by some passages from “Scritti corsari”, those very lucid and still highly relevant texts where Pasolini analyzed the role of media, school, politics, and culture.

One of the central themes he raised – and that resurfaces powerfully in Notte Tempo – is precisely the drift of information: articles constructed to sell, journalists paid per piece, content turned into products to be placed.
Pasolini was already talking back then about how newspapers manipulated reality, seeking not the truth, but the news that makes noise.
And if today it seems to you that on Facebook or Instagram people only comment by reading the title… well, he predicted it half a century ago.

Zucchi and De Nova manage to bring all this to the stage with lightness and intelligence. 
The jokes are funny (even if the mentioned titles are real)  but they also leave you with that feeling of “curse, it’s just like that”.
There is a thread that connects the newsrooms of yesterday with today’s social media feeds, and the show illustrates it well, without moralism but with a lot of irony.

I, not to be outdone, played with the title: I wrote “a flop” to see who falls for it, who stops there, who comments without reading.
But if you’ve made it this far, it means the trick didn’t work on you. 
Or maybe it did, and you were curious. In either case… well done. 
You did exactly what the show invites us to do: go beyond the surface.

And so, if you have the chance, go see Notte Tempo
It’s an intelligent show that digs into the past to help us better understand the present.
And then, excuse me, it’s not every day that we get to hear the words of Pasolini thanks to the voices of two great actors like Umberto Ceriani and Franco Sangermano, who still speak to us.

Follow the social page of Il Milione to find out about upcoming dates.

And once again: Enjoy the, indeed, excellent opening night in Castionetto!