The Greek National Opera presents an ambitious new production of the comic opera Falstaff inside the Stavros Niarchos Hall at the SNFCC. Giuseppe Verdi’s swan song, based on the Shakespeare comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, is being conducted by Pier Giorgio Morandi and directed by Stephen Langridge.
Studio River had the pleasure of producing the promotional video for the play. A carte blanche driven by the theme of light.
The video seeks to show, in a very short and poetic way, the atypical journey of this singular character. For a long time poor and mocked, Falsatff was able to obtain what he wanted by dint of persistence. At the beginning the character has nothing, just a dirty glass and an old bottle of wine in which he finds comfort. But the more time passes, the more his social condition evolves, the cheating that the card game suggests, and the casualness that he shows through the dance are the engines of his evolution.
With time the bottle of wine finally turns into a cloud of bottles of the best vintage ones. And to conclude Falstaff finally seduces the ladies of Windsor, gets married and enjoys his wealth. He has finally risen.
The character is described as a creator of chaos, paunchy and full of flaws. So the idea in this movie was to introduce the chaos through a ballet of bottles that spin and twirl around him, through a multitude of elements that frantically adapt to his dance steps. We tried to build a certain form of aesthetics in this emotional and material disorder. Because even if this man has nothing attractive at first sight, he always ends up enchanting the public. Falstaff dances on the bar because he is drunk, he is a bon vivant, he laughs and leads us in spite of ourselves into the light, symbol of a successful quest.
