Antonio Latella

Antonio Latella was born in the region of Naples in 1967 to a family of workers exiled to Turin. He left college at 17 and trained at the Teatro Stabile before joining the Bottega Teatrale school, founded in Florence by Vittorio Gassman. At the age of 22 he started playing for the most prestigious Italian directors of the 1980s, such as Pippo Di Marca, Luca Ronconi, Massimo Castri, or Tito Piscitelli. In 1997, he directed his first show, Marguerite Duras's Agatha. From then on he focused exclusively on his own projects, all marked by a meticulous exploration of the worlds of the authors whose work he adapted: Jean Genet, Christopher Marlowe, Samuel Beckett... In 2001, he won the Ubu Prize for Shakespeare and Beyond, a series of reinterpretations of Othello (1999), Macbeth (2000), Romeo and Juliet (2000), and Hamlet (2001). His shows are physical, almost carnal, and focus particularly on family, revisiting the great verbal tradition of Italian theatre. A key figure in the resurgence of Italian theatre, he was recently appointed director of the Venice Theatre Festival.  

Portrait of Antonio Latella © portrait Andrea Pizzalis