It starts with a performance: Otto the magician is making Calogero’s husband disappear, doing so at the request of the husband’s mistress so that the two can run away together. Four years go by… but the magician has convinced Calogero that the lapse of time is only the short duration of the show on stage, that her husband is there locked inside the box and that she will be able to open it once she is convinced that he really is inside. With De Filippo, we are clearly in the realm of a fable, a setting for the imagination rather than a real-life situation acted out on stage. Here is a drama driven by a weird and wonderful vision of the world, by powerful and mysterious human strength.
The work no doubt interested us because of the subject of magic and illusion, in line with Pirandello’s Six Characters. As is the case with Pirandello, life is a strange version of role-play, and reality is nothing but the fruit of our imagination. La Grande Magie stands as part of a broader way of addressing the meaning of our world and society, of our relationship with reality, with truth and illusion. What is truth and can the stage bring it forth?

A few magnificent, dreamlike images plus an unsettling gender switch as Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota brings new life to the play in its opaque light. Télérama

The staging is spectacular, and the tragi-comic duo of Valérie Dashwood as Calogero and Serge Maggiani as Otto the magician works delightfully. Les Echos

The staging by the director of the Théâtre de la Ville conveys an intelligent and enlightening view of the intentions of the playwright from Naples. (...) And at the end, the audience is quite unsettled. Le Figaro

Unexpected and disquieting. (...) The atmosphere is of a funfair, with all its sounds, lights and machinery: effective and impressive. L’Humanité