Shakespearean dreams for a New Prison

The practice of theatre in prison has a much shorter tradition in Italy than in the English-speaking world. However in recent times Italy has caught up and some and yet Italian prisons have become a vibrating and unpredictable Shakespearean laboratory. All kinds of activities are going on, ranging from productions, such as Armando Punzo’s at the Volterra High Security Prison, which have achieved major aesthetic results, to drama therapy, where the aim is rehabilitation and reintegration. Today in Italy Prison Shakespeare contributes not only to trigger a reflection on pivotal topics such as detention, sentences, and punishment, but also, and even more important, to experiment practices of creativity, freedom and utopia, thus giving voice to an urgent cultural and political need for a re-engagment with the idea of prison. After sketching briefly the work in prison by visionary directors such as Punzo and Fabio Cavalli, I will focus on “Un Sogno al Beccaria” (“A dream in Beccaria”), a project involving a group of university students and Puntozero Teatro, a no-profit young people’s theatre company working inside the Juvenile Detention Institute Cesare Beccaria, in Milan. The rewriting and staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by a mixed group of students and inmates served to bridge the gap between the world inside the prison and the outside. It also suggested the way towards both alternative juvenile interventions to reduce recidivism and crime, and a successful means to make young people outside aware of and question issues concerning prison – a topic very rarely discussed in a school or university contexts.