Giovanni Verga

David Lan's new version of Verga's classic play "Mothers like me? We should be burned alive. We should be fed to the pigs, mothers like me." A mother fumes about her daughter's love affair as they hurtle towards tragedy in Verga's passionate Italian drama, first performed in 1894.David Lan's acclaimed new version premiered at the RSC in June 2000.

Drawn from the Sicily of Giovanni Verga's childhood - at the time, the poorest place in Europe - the stories in Little Novels of Sicily capture life's inimitably ironic blend of beauty and sorrow. A loudly lamenting widower enters negotiations for a new wife even before the grave is filled; a donkey driver finds the patronage of the king a mixed blessing; and successful revolutionaries discover that liberty is of short duration. Full of twists in perspective and lyrically described landscapes, Verga's stories record the class struggles of Risorgimento Italy, the relationship between men and the land, and the cynical yet reassuring intimacy of life in a rural community. In deceptively simple, powerfully concentrated prose, Verga shifts between affection and dry detachment, but never turns his gaze away from life as it is really lived.

Giovanni Verga’s masterful portrayal of Sicilian fishermen in the late nineteenth century is the story of an ancient society in which both egalitarianism and hierarchy coexist, partly because everyone is on the brink of poverty to some extent. It is also a society undergoing irreversible change as the free market encroaches and brings with it not more equality but more hierarchy based on dubious practices which replace an ingrained and functional morality with a moral vacuum. The process has not been completed and the book could be considered a warning to future generations. However this is not a judgemental novel and it follows the precepts of verismo, the Italian version of realism influenced by French naturalism but also distinctive, particularly in Verga’s case. The author also adopted the innovative practice of free indirect discourse but often skilfully turned it into a choral voice representing the values of the society he depicts. Sicily has often attracted outside attention, but mostly its society and complexities have been misrepresented. This English version of The Malavoglias is not only a magnificent classic unjustly ignored in the Anglosphere but also an extraordinary and detached examination of a particular society suffering a moral malaise not so different from our own, although ours is a malaise of declining affluence. It therefore has as much to say about the human condition today as it had to the very different society depicted in these pages, which was going in the opposite direction.

Häkkilinnun tarina on italialaisen verismin mestarin Giovanni Vergan nuoruudessaan kirjoittama kirjeromaani, jossa nuori Maria joutuu perheensä köyhyyden takia nunnaksi. Luostarissa hänen on tarkoitus viettää loppuelämänsä, mutta koleraepidemian aikana hän saa asua hetken perheensä kanssa maaseudulla. Siellä Maria kokee elämän iloja ja rakastuu Ninoon, mikä sysää hänet syvään eksistentiaaliseen kriisiin.