In a house for railway workers, next to a crossing loop, the pointsman and his wife see the days pass by as they see trains pass by, from the platform. Life and work crisscross in a peculiar ritual of gestures and actions with no beginning or end. He devotes himself to taking care of the tracks and changing the points. She complements her husband’s job by checking and packing the small promotional items which the Railway Company gives them. Always the same trains, always at the same time, the same routine over and over again, in a job and in a life signalled by the train schedule.

 They both live silently their own frustrations and yearnings; they both live silently not to stop… loving each other?

 The Railway Company sends an observer who is commissioned to exhaustively monitor the pointsman’s work. Hostilely received and forced to live with the couple, he will become part of the circle of silence, which is only broken by the odd telephone call, some times announcing without words the arrival of a train, some times giving precise instructions to the inhabitants of the house.

Prologue.

With humour and deepness as the basis of the project, and the lack of words as a starting point (and not the target), it is shaped the spirit of a work that digs into the essence of expression, the accuracy of gesture and the economy of expressiveness. The project starts from the premise of using words only when there is no other way to depict a situation or mood and, at the same time, of our not being easily pleased with a trivial story, not telling a simple anecdote, not creating a succession of gags, but creating a playwriting with enough interesting points and round characters who express their emotions, who carry the burden of their past, who have yearnings, who live uncomfortable realities and who can see the uncertainty of their future. We want to go into the characters and the actors’ work in greater depth, to find the process and its expression forcing ourselves to get away from speech so as to find the exact meaning of each movement and each object on stage.

 It is a pursuit of the essence of theatrical expression, essentiality that reaches other aspects of the staging as well, from the scenography and the use of space to the lighting and the sound. Playing with space, with time and silence, creating a code which is perfectly intelligible for the spectator and laden with true emotion. Our technique is not based on mime, dancing or masks; it is about creating the necessary dramatic situation so that it transcends with no need for words. If speech is a barrier, we intend to come over it making our language universal.