Review: UCCELLINI (LITTLE BIRDS), The Coronet Theatre

Ghosts, death, and the local fauna join the living in a house in the middle of the woods. When Luka takes his girlfriend to his childhood home to spend her birthday relaxing in solitude, she’s suddenly met with the weight of Luka’s family dynamics. Secluded in the damp darkness of the trees, Luka (Francesco Villano) and his brother Theo (Emiliano Masala) are forced to dig up the past. Rosalinda Conti’s play is an explosion of subtle emotion. It blends tradition with avant-garde flair in a clever stylistic exercise directed by Lisa Ferlazzo Natoli and Alessandro Ferroni.

Uccellini is an evasive piece of theatre. Conti experiments with vibrant symbolism, writing a beautifully evocative script that urges the audience to dive past the surface level and dip into their own imagination. She invokes the power of memory – visual and physical – to reach the depths of traumatic dysfunction. The language (both the original Italian and its English translation) might slip into melodramatic artificiality here and there, but it fits the positive overall pretentiousness of the project. 

Marco Rossi and Francesca Sgariboldi’s design isolates the actors inside a mesh structure that represents the house. Projections and shadow-play flood its translucency, toying with our perception of the staging. Videos of trees and animals engulf the front while figurines of birds dot the space: the outside continuously intrudes on the inside. There’s something strikingly gothic in its storytelling.

By suspending the story in a cage, separating it from reality beyond the fourth wall, the direction establishes a solid atmosphere of mystery. Ferroni’s soundscapes place further emphasis on Conti’s ghostly turns. Luke and Theo’s baggage transpires from broken conversations and their half-addressed acrimony. Anna (Petra Valentini) is left to piece the fragments together from what two petulant, contrarian men leave unsaid.

Between their brotherly rivalry and the unexamined debris of the loss of two family members to suicide, a complex relationship with the world surfaces, instigating a strange communion with death and nature. The company summons Ibsen with a Chekhovian echo, delivering a gorgeous show. Clocking in at 90 minutes without an interval, it’s a swift, suggestive production

Uccellini (Little Birds) runs at The Coronet Theatre until 2 May.