"MATCH!" - Rome's Bold Contemporary Theatre Festival Challenges Conformity

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RomeTeatro TorloniaMATCH! festival

A daring contemporary theatre festival led by under-35 playwrights and directors is electrifying Rome's Teatro Torlonia, featuring performances, intellectual duels, and theatrical football matches.Venue: Teatro Torlonia, Via Lazzaro Spallanzani 1A, Rome

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MATCH!: Teatro di Roma's Youth Initiative

This is Teatro di Roma's bold bet on emerging talent — MATCH!, the capital's public theatre project dedicated to contemporary playwriting as a production support system for rising creative voices.

Curated by two of today's most subversive theatrical voices — Niccolò Fettarappa and Leonardo Manzan — this unprecedented format transforms Teatro Torlonia into an innovation hub and creative residency space for four under-35 theatre companies. Moving beyond the traditional festival format, it delivers four co-productions to audiences, each one daring to dismantle conventions and redefine the boundaries of performance.

After an intensive month-long residency, the four selected companies developed their artistic research around this edition's core themes: theatrical competition, performative debate, and the vertigo of disagreement. The results take the stage at Teatro Torlonia from July 17 to 29, featuring four shows in double-bill performances — eight performances in total.

The Spirit of the Project

Curators Niccolò Fettarappa and Leonardo Manzan explain the project's ethos: "Enough with agreeing. In acting schools they teach us that conflict is the engine of theatre. Then you graduate and discover that the real engine of the industry is mutual flattery. MATCH! was born from a suspicion that contemporary theatre has become too comfortable agreeing with itself. We invite each other, we admire each other, we compliment each other. Everything is far too polite. But is it sincere? Art should provoke, disturb, shake up certainties."

MATCH! is a festival where performances, workshops, theatrical football matches, and intellectual duels attempt to reignite what theatre constantly talks about but increasingly rarely practices: the pleasure of disagreeing. Because we believe that conflict is one of the most fertile forms of cultural life. The worst enemy of art isn't confrontation — it's politeness. Bring your rudeness from home and experience the vertigo of disagreeing even with yourself.

Niccolò Fettarappa and Leonardo Manzan

The Programme

Taking up this challenge and transforming it into living material is the lineup of MATCH!'s four shows — a true generational battlefield where under-35 creativity explores the fractures, psychoses, and paradoxes of our present through radical and unpredictable scenic devices. The co-production journey kicks off on July 17 and 18 with Pesce rosso aggredito dalla solitudine (Goldfish Attacked by Loneliness) by Fratelli Sinigaglia, a piece inspired by an anecdote from Jim Carrey's life, spinning within a performative vortex on the short-circuit between extreme comfort and psychic decay.

On July 21 and 22, the stage shifts to Vita di San Genesio Reloaded by Alessandro Paschitto, which reinterprets the myth of the patron saint of actors and jesters, transforming the theatrical act into a decadent and alienated ritual: a parody of our daily actions where the "miraculous" perhaps remains the only gesture to react to a world that escapes us.

July 24 and 25 feature Odio extra-vergine (Extra-Virgin Hatred) by Lidia Margiotta, a sharp investigation attempting to distill contemporary resentment — political, media-driven, and everyday — until the irruption of reality and social conflict cracks the scenic device, forcing the protagonists to reckon with the complexity and violence of the present.

Closing the programme on July 28 and 29 is 16:9, a performative multimedia installation by Danilo Maglio that questions the nature of relationships in an era of mediated gazes — the dialogue between a single performer and digital technological devices explores the concepts of presence, isolation, and disappearance, transforming absence itself into the engine of scenic research.

Performative and Verbal Duels

MATCH!'s battlefield extends beyond representation into direct verbal and physical confrontation through duels, theatrical football, and workshops. Energising the evenings are the MATCH! duels — performative and verbal showdowns inspired by Alberto Arbasino's historic TV format. Close encounters between different personalities, visions, and imaginations, called to publicly confront each other on specific themes, transforming cultural debate into a full theatrical event.

The programme opens with a preview on July 14 (8 PM) featuring a showdown between Stefano Massini vs Luca De Fusco. The challenges continue through subsequent festival nights: July 25 (9 PM) brings What Will Remain of These 80s? with a four-way crossover between Emanuele Aldrovandi vs Nicola Borghesi vs Licia Lanera vs Federica Rosellini, while July 29 (9 PM) closes with Fight Club — the head-on clash between Antonio Rezza vs Gabriele Vacis.

Further igniting the festival are two theatrical football matches on July 17 and 24 (7 PM), titled We'll Never Win the World Cup — or How the Azzurri Decided to Drop Everything and Throw Themselves into Theatre. Staged outdoors in Teatro Torlonia's greenhouse area, these performances represent the final outcome of the advanced training workshop for under-27 actors led by Fettarappa and Manzan themselves — football reimagined through the lens of performance, with choirs, choreographies, live commentary, in a short-circuit where competition finally ceases to be a metaphor.

Finally, the theatre criticism workshop led by Graziano Graziani, conducted in previous months, adds an observational and narrative layer to this ecosystem, accompanying the festival with its chronicle.

With MATCH!, Teatro di Roma reaffirms its role as an incubator of the contemporary, offering new generations not just a visibility platform, but a tool of intellectual provocation and artistic freedom.

Practical Information

Teatro Torlonia is located at Via Lazzaro Spallanzani 1A. Show tickets: single seat €10 full price; €8 reduced. MATCH! duel tickets: free entry with Eventbrite reservation. Football matches (Tournament Field): free entry.

For more information: box office tel. +39 06 44230693; email biglietteria@teatrodiroma.net. Further details are available on the dedicated event page and the Teatro di Roma website.