Between radio frequencies and the abyssal songs of whales, Ballad Opera is a poetic manifesto against the culture of death. Inspired by Sotto il bosco di latte, Dylan Thomas’s celebrated “play for voices,” the work celebrates life, innocence, plurality and the childhood of the world through the imagined Welsh seaside village created for radio by the great poet.

At its heart lies the unfinished dream of Renato Striglia—radio DJ, rock visionary and quintessential beautiful loser—who longed to bring Thomas’s masterpiece to life but never had the chance to do so.

The fifteen original songs written by Vinicio Capossela, together with a multitude of voices, characters and obsessions, populate the solitude of a man lying in an empty bathtub. He is at once Renato Striglia, Captain Cat and Dylan Thomas himself: a modern Noah adrift in a patched-up ark.

The result is a radio musical immersed in darkness, where the voices emerging from the “milk wood” become the voices of our shared humanity. A sanctuary of innocence besieged by the worlds of law, power and order, the work celebrates the subversive force of remaining true to oneself despite everything—even death itself.

Author’s Notes

This story, this radio drama, these songs and the Ballad Opera we present today all originate from a death. From a seed that must survive beyond death in order to generate new life.

That seed was Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas’s masterpiece for voices, first broadcast by the BBC in 1954, only months after the poet’s death. Conceived specifically for radio, it is a work capable of keeping company to the sleepless. Johnny Depp once remarked that Richard Burton’s narration had accompanied him to sleep since childhood.

Renato Striglia, however, did not sleep. He smoked, raged and burned through the night. The narrator’s voice in Thomas’s work seems to observe us, describing not only our actions but even our dreams.

The present staging embraces radio’s essential blindness. Like Captain Cat, one of Thomas’s central characters, it explores what cannot be seen. It draws on the language of radio drama, spirit voices, frequencies, tuning and, above all, waves: the waves that carry whale songs, sirens’ warnings, radio transmissions and dreams. The waves of the primordial sea that laps against the Welsh village. The waves of history itself.

At the centre of the stage stands a bathtub transformed into a patched-up Noah’s Ark—a temporary refuge against the flood. It shelters the fragile truth each of us carries through life: a small kernel of authenticity preserved against oblivion.

The work is also a story of friendship, particularly male friendship, a form of human connection that has become increasingly rare in contemporary storytelling. For this reason, Pierpaolo Capovilla was invited to join Capossela inside this symbolic vessel.

Together they celebrate a series of endangered values: rock’n’roll, the epic dignity of failure, mutiny, sabotage, rebellion, thunderous solitude, anarchism and untamed freedom.

Around the bathtub gather the ghosts of a lifetime in the form of songs. These songs emerge from the obsessions and desires of the inhabitants of Llareggub, Thomas’s strange village, where people live in a kind of Edenic suspension beyond judgment and beyond time itself. Everything repeats, preserved and unchanged, while the forces of authority, utility and order attempt to contain what they perceive as madness and disorder.

Performed by multiple voices, the songs become a counterpoint to the empty room left behind by Renato Striglia.

Ultimately, Ballad Opera is an act of resistance against death and against a culture increasingly obsessed with it. It seeks to affirm life through imagination, memory and solidarity, echoing the appeal once launched by filmmaker Silvano Agosti: to recognize the human being as humanity’s most precious heritage.

Running time: 120 minutes

Audience notice: The performance includes extended periods of complete darkness in the auditorium.