ABSTRACT
Theatre director Following an apprenticeship in acting and mime with Alessandro Fersen, in 1957 Trionfo founded the cabaret theatre Borsa d’Arlecchino (Harlequin’s Bag) in Genoa, where for the next three years he staged avantgarde texts. He subsequently alternated between musical and prose theatre, demonstrating a devastating wit in approaching the classical texts as well as a talent for discovering minor or unusual works, from Salgari to the Elizabethan repertoires, from Hubay to Dreyer, from Pavese to Svevo, from Roversi to Patti. Often original scripts are contextualized more widely, in satirical collages representative of the bourgeois imaginary His overall strategy is a celebration of grotesque registers and vaudeville counterpoint, creating vertiginous associations between high and low culture. Exemplary in this sense are the Festa per la beatificazione di Margherita Gautier, la Signora delle Camelie, santa seconda categoria (Feast for the Beatification of Margherita Gautier, Lady of the Camelias and Second-Rate Saint) of 1972 and his Faust-Marlowe-Burlesque of 1976. In spite of his subversiveness and irreverence, he was appointed head of the Turin State Theatre in 1972 and the Roman Academy in 1980. His work often crossed paths with the elegant fairy-tale scenography of Emmanuele Luzzati and the whimsical dramaturgy of Tonino Conte.
