The western audience met for the first time "Turandot" in 1762, when the Venetian Carlo Gozzi attracted a vast audience with his theatre play based on a Persian fairy-tale. A modern adaptation of the story however, must also consider its numerous later versions. The riddles of this mysterious exotic woman have challenged the creativity of artists such as Friedrich Schiller, Giacomo Puccini, Bertolt Brecht and Zhang Yimou, who preserved elements of adventure, mystery, romance and esotericism. This powerful mix, driven by a life-threatening situation is an evergreen key for any entertaining story.
Turandot is beautiful, highly intelligent, cynical, and inaccessible, attempting to preserve her emancipation from men. If it is true that any good narration is built on opposites, then the opposition between Turandot and Kalaf offers a most fertile ground to explore the complexity of human behaviour, as well as the “battle of the sexes”, a topic that will never fully stop to be explored.
Our approach is to preserve the mystery of the original fairy-tale, while placing it into a real, modern and unexpected setting such as the Chinese community of the cinematic area of Piazza Vittorio in Rome.