Characters and Performers

Count Francesco Cenci 
Kate Wallis

Beatrice, Cenci's daughter 
Charlotte Williams

Giacomo, Cenci's son
 Michele Santini

Bernardo, Cenci's son 
Daniela Gaspari

Cardinal Camillo 
Lidia Icardi

Orsino, a Prelate 
Giampiero Bagni

Savella, the Pope's Legate
Carmen Baiamonte

Olimpio, Assassin 
Cristiano Zanetti

Marzio, Assassin 
Luca Fontana

Andrea, Servant to Cenci
Alessandro Currò

 Judge 
Matteo Orlando

Guard and Officer 
Enrico Carpanelli

Lucrezia, Cenci's wife and step-mother of his children 
Michela Montevecchi

direction and adaption
Charlotte Williams and Kate Wallis

make-up
Arianna Lombini and Carolina Cuizza

prompt
Helen Carroll

photography
Stefano Foglia

This is a condensed version of Shelley’s play The Cenci, written in Rome in 1819, set in 1599 and based on the true story of the Roman Cenci family.

Shelley’s work was directly inspired by his discovery of Guido Reni’s painting Beatrice Cenci and it is a product of his perception of Italian Renaissance culture.

The play opens with a dialogue between Cenci and Cardinal Camillo. It is immediately evident that Cenci is a hideous tyrant. His perverse character is reinforced during the banquet scene, when he rejoices at the news of his sons’ deaths. All the characters hold Count Cenci in great fear with the exception of his daughter Beatrice, until the scene of their implied incest. Unable to contend with this physical and psychological violation, Beatrice resorts to plotting her father’s death with her step-mother and brothers. They hire assassins to commit the deed itself and it becomes increasingly apparent that Beatrice has trasgressed into an alter-ego of her father. The plot is discovered by officials and all involved are sentenced to death.

In the final scene Beatrice’s stoical attitude to her death is courageous, and we see a character with a great tragic potential.

Beatrice is therefore a proto-feminist character but she also belongs to the great tradition of tragic classical and neo-classical heroines including Antigone, Medea and Myrrha. But, above all, we see her as a typical Shellyan heroine, a symbol of the endless struggle for freedom.

This work, one of the few English romantic tragedies written not only for recital but for the stage, has in fact rarely been performed this century: one of the few occasions was P. B. Shelley’s bicentenary celebrated in New York in 1992.

Revenge, retaliation, atonement, are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a tragic character […]

‘The Cenci’ - Preface

I love the sight of agony, and the sense of joy,

When this shall be another’s, and that mine.

And I have no remorse and little fear […].

Death! Death! Our law and our religion call thee

A punishment and a reward… Oh, which

Have I deserved?

I do not feel as if I were a man,

But I like a fiend appointed to chastise

The offences of some unremembered world.

My blood is running up and down my veins;

A fearful pleasure makes it prick and tingle:

I feel a giddy sickness of strange awe;

My heart is beating with an expectation

Of horrid joy.

Savella
 
You own

That you desire his death?

Beatrice  

It would have been

A crime no less than his, if for one moment

That fierce desire had faded in my heart.

What! Will you cast by self-accusing flight

Assured conviction upon Beatrice?

She, who alone in this unnatural work,

Stands like God's angel ministered upon

By fiends; avenging such nameless wrong

As turns black parricide to piety.