Dialogues that never happened

A telephone, through which a failed actor, playing the role of Fernando Pessoa, dreams of confiding his fears and anxieties to Luigi Pirandello ("Signora Pirandello is asked to come to the telephone"); a man struggling in despair in a hospital ward, experiencing the irreparable loss of a loved one ("Time is running out").... In both of these plays, one of the characters is a mysterious deuteragonist, someone's impossible or unattainable presence, which is at the same time an absence. "That other one" (respectively a ghost or a corpse) is perceived as an object of desire and as an opponent who, by his death, has avoided a decisive, deadly duel. However, through "that other one", the protagonist's monologue tries to understand his own essence and catch at least a fragment of his personality in the broken mirror of existence. Thus, the loneliness of modern man is revealed: a poor, pitiful Narcissus, whom no one looks at, and who is unable to see even himself. As in the two bizarre “moments of truth” when the bull does not enter the arena and thereby exposes the torero to ridicule, in these “Dialogues that were not” the theme of loneliness acquires a contradictory sound and causes anxiety, as if in anticipation of an answer or a laugh that never comes to reassure or justify the protagonist.