The stage at the Tumanishvili Theater opens like a wound. Inside it, a well—bottomless, ancient, echoing—waits for the audience to fall in. MADRE, the latest work by Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari of Teatro delle Albe, does not unfold as a play in the traditional sense. It breathes, groans, and meditates as a stage poem—a tragic psalm for a planet losing its own maternal voice. Presented at the GIFT Festival in Tbilisi, the performance becomes a strange form of modern ritual: a requiem for humanity’s addiction to progress.
Ermanna Montanari’s voice, half incantation, half erosion, sets the tone for this journey into the underworld. The mother, trapped in the well, speaks from a depth that feels geological. Her words carry the sediment of centuries, of myths that have crumbled into dust. She is both an individual and an element—a maternal Earth that has ceased to nurture and has begun to decay. Marco Martinelli frames this descent in language that oscillates between prophetic urgency and fable-like simplicity, echoing Dante and Pasolini in equal measure. The audience, seated in the semi-darkness, becomes a congregation listening to the Earth confess its exhaustion.
The son—an emblem of modern man, frantic and mechanized—tries to rescue her with the tools of civilization: pipes, engines, tires, iron. Each object is an artifact of ingenuity and despair. The well grows deeper with every attempt, as if technology itself were widening the abyss it claims to bridge. Daniel Roccato’s sound design layers industrial rumble and subterranean resonance, transforming the theater into a metallic cathedral where faith has been replaced by the hum of machines.
There is no salvation in MADRE. The mother’s serenity, her calm acceptance of the underground, is more unsettling than her fall. She does not plead for deliverance. She dissolves into the darkness with the composure of something that has understood the end as a natural state. Montanari performs her with a slow-burning gravity—her face a flickering landscape between agony and transcendence. Each pause in her speech is a chasm. Each exhalation feels like the final breath of an ecosystem.
Teatro delle Albe has spent four decades mapping the border between theater and myth, between political urgency and spiritual lament. Their MADRE belongs to this lineage, yet it feels like an epitaph to it. The work’s poetic density replaces narrative with resonance, inviting the spectator into an experience closer to a medieval mystery play than to a modern drama. Martinelli’s writing does not describe; it invokes. The text exists as a score of images—burned fields, drowned voices, rusted altars.
In the Tumanishvili theater’s compact space, the production achieves the intimacy of an inner vision. Light and shadow behave as moral forces. Stefano Ricci’s visual design shapes the darkness into architecture; every glint of reflection feels like a signal from another realm. The stage becomes an x-ray of the human condition—its bones made of iron and its heart encased in asphalt.
The well, in this cosmology, is not only a place of descent but a mirror turned downward. It reflects our collective face: exhausted, luminous, and slightly terrified. MADRE does not accuse; it mourns. The mourning, though, carries a strange dignity. There is a quiet beauty in watching a civilization confront its own reflection and recognize its resemblance to its dying mother.
At the end, silence becomes the final character. It lingers long after the lights fade, like the echo of an unanswered prayer. The audience remains seated, suspended between awe and unease. The performance leaves them not with catharsis, but with the uneasy clarity of having stared into the well and seen how much of the world is already at the bottom.
Teatro delle Albe’s MADRE is an act of philosophical theater in an era that rarely permits reflection. It speaks through images rather than slogans, through vibration rather than spectacle. In the context of the GIFT Festival—a space dedicated to cross-cultural artistic communion—it resonates as a reminder that the most radical gesture in art today might be contemplation itself.
In Tbilisi, where histories of collapse and renewal coexist within every street, MADRE feels almost prophetic. It stages the collapse of illusion without despair, transforming apocalypse into awareness. In the theater’s dim well of light, humanity listens to its own voice fading into the earth. And for a moment, the echo sounds like prayer.
Review by Ivan Nechaev
