Case di morti. L’interno domestico come spazio perturbante tra il teatro antico e la drammaturgia di Maeterlinck e Strindberg

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The first section of the article demonstrates how through a great part of the XIXth century the prevailing attitude of fantastic on European stages is a spectacular one, aiming at direct effects of marvel or fear on its audience. In this case the dramatic and scenic space works like a boîte à merveilles, a container of well visible supernatural events. Only towards the end of the century, in the plays of some great authors a more refined attitude of fantastic emerges, where the supernatural, besides assuming a strong symbolic value, creeps into the “real world” in a less evident, but more effective and disquieting way. Thus, the second part of the article focuses on the transformation of the emblematic set of the bourgeois drama, the domestic interior, into an uncanny space, which Death besieges from outside or occupies as a secret parasite. This hypothesis is verified through a detailed analysis of dramatic space in The Intruder by Maurice Maeterlinck and in The Ghost Sonata by August Strindberg. In the first play a domestic space is made unheimlich by the atmosphere of alarmed wait by which the characters get involved; here, like in other Maeterlinck’s plays, the sounds become a fundamental element of the transformation of space and of its assumption of a fantastic dimension. In Strindberg’s drama a “normal” house acquires sinister characteristics, till it reveals itself, without any resort to conventionally supernatural images, a refuge of living dead and a place where everything is weakened by a sort of vampire haunting.