Opera dei Pupi - Syracuse — Attraction in Syracuse

The Teatro dei Pupi is presented as a show that is suitable for adults and children. We went with our two daughters aged 2,5 and 5 years old. The youngest asked to leave the room at the middle of the piece. Our eldest daughter was in tears well after the end of the play.

We would not recommend this puppet play for children, except if they are already accustomed to images of violence (through watching tv, etc.), and are desensitised in that sense. Most of the play displays men fighting with swords, killing and beheading each other. Female roles are similarly stereotypic: the beginning of the play depicts the main female character half naked as she has been abandoned by her husband after their first wedding night. Her honour, however, is soon recovered by a valiant young man who kills the monster who was supposed to put an end to her despair - and she walks back around dressed in an honorific way for a lady.

For an older audience (perhaps from the age of 8), if they can be explained the concepts of tragedy, fate, gender roles, courage in the face of adversity, representations of seduction and love, and skin colour stereotypes (the villains are often depicted with black faces, or have the faces of Moors), through a sociological and historical lens, it can be indeed a very interesting and telling experience about the social and historical context of Sicily. The puppets themselves are beautiful and very distinctive.

We probably would have enjoyed the performance much more without our children, as we have the distance to be able to reflect on these representations, whereas our...

We were 3 adult American females who were really looking forward to this. Unfortunately, we were really disappointed. The seats are much like church pews and are quite uncomfortable. It is a small theater, which got very warm as the theater filled up.

While the construction and costuming of the puppets is magnificent, what really disappointed us was the performance itself. Because we don't understand Italian, which was the language of the performance, we were only able to focus on the performance, not the script. Most of the puppets carried swords and shields. We found the performance to be very violent. There was a lot of shouting and a lot of banging of the swords against the shields. After one of the puppets was beheaded, a child in the audience began to cry hysterically and was literally unconsolable. While this is marketed as a puppet show for children, none of us felt it was appropriate for children.

While this is billed as an "opera," there is absolutely no music in the presentation.

All in all, a very...

I read about the traditional Sicilian Puppet Theater in the book by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, who was in Sicily many times. His stay in Syracuse was very fruitful, one of the stories was written here, a poem about Fonte Aretusa, immortalized in the music of his cousin, Karol Szymanowski. And also a sketch about the town itself with a description of a visit to the Puppet Theater, where he watched a performance with a friend among workers and fishermen. Iwaszkiewicz found it deeply rooted in Sicilian landscape and culture. The decorations, in their emptiness and dramatics, come from the Sicilian landscape, and the performance showed the theatrical and artistic instinct of Sicilians in a wonderful form. The writer's friend, the painter, said: It's a pity, that Diagilev did not see it. It's prettier than Russian ballet. A delightful performance, voyage in time - to the colorful past of commedia dell'arte, knightly epics and even ancient theater. Congratulations to the team!...