Ballad Opera

with Vinicio Capossela and Pierpaolo Capovilla
freely inspired by the life of Renato Striglia and the work of Dylan Thomas

“And death shall have no dominion.”
— Dylan Thomas

“Though lovers be lost love shall not”
— Dylan Thomas

Between radio frequencies drifting through the airwaves and the abyssal signals of whales, Ballad Opera becomes a poetic manifesto and a defiant response to the culture of death.

The work draws inspiration from Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas’s legendary “play for voices,” celebrating life, innocence, plurality and the childhood of the world within the imaginary seaside village created by the Welsh poet for radio — a project that radio rock DJ and beautiful loser Renato Striglia dreamed of bringing to life, but never managed to realize.

Fifteen original songs written by Vinicio Capossela, together with characters, voices and obsessions, crowd the solitude of a man lying inside an empty bathtub — a figure who is at once Renato, Captain Cat and Dylan Thomas himself, “Noah of the bay in his patched-up ark.”

The performance unfolds as a radio musical immersed in darkness, where the voices emerging from the milk wood become the voices of our shared humanity.

It is a territory of innocence besieged by the worlds of law, power and order — a mutiny against submission that celebrates the subversive force of being oneself, despite everything… even death.