Giorgio Pasotti – Racconti disumani@Teatro Marrucino

The stage is almost bare, yet dense with implication. A man in a deep red suit leans forward over a small stepped platform, his body angled as if straining toward something invisible. The light catches the side of his face, leaving the rest of the space in heavy shadow. To his right, suspended in the darkness, an image of a bottle looms, projected larger than life—its glass skin ghostly, its presence more oppressive than inanimate.

This is Kafka territory. The stripped set, the exaggerated scale, the isolation of the figure—they all speak the language of unease. The microphone at centre stage stands unused, a silent witness, or perhaps a channel for a voice yet to arrive. The floor beneath the actor is uneven, cracked, its texture echoing a kind of psychic erosion.

Photographing theatre like this is about more than freezing movement. It’s about catching the space between lines, the tension in a breath, the dialogue between light and shadow. Here, the illumination is surgical—pinning the actor in a pool of focus while letting the surrounding dark press in, just as Kafka’s words press in on his characters.

The image works because it is incomplete. It does not tell the story; it tells the moment you are not sure if you want to know the story at all. In the frame, the audience is absent, the sound unheard, but the unease is tangible. That is the gift of photographing live performance: translating a transient, living act into a still image that still manages to breathe.