"Perfect Strangers" at the Poliorama Theatre

At a dinner among four couples who have known each other all their lives, a game is proposed that will put their worst secrets on the table: reading aloud the messages and calls from their mobile phones; their entire life, shared for all in that moment. Surely, many hidden aspects will come to light.

Perfect Strangers is one of those works that belongs to the comedy genre, with a touch of farce, where the characters play a cat-and-mouse game and the social masks fall just when they are most expected to stay in place.

Few know that the film Perfetti sconosciuti (2016) by Paolo Genovese, on which the play is based, has been adapted in 25 countries and has entered the Guinness Book of Records as the film with the most remakes in the history of world cinema.

The situation presented in the film is very universal: a gathering of couples of friends of different ages. The evening becomes promising when someone proposes a game that all attendees accept: to leave their mobiles in the center of the table and allow the others to follow any event (calls, WhatsApps, conversations, messages, chats and social media notifications) so that, in this shameless display halfway between morbid curiosity and gossip, everyone learns things about the others.

What at first seems like a fun and entertaining distraction, almost innocent, becomes tricky and perverse, because it turns out that no one is who they seem, not everything that is shown is legal, and many areas of intimacy come to light without the immaculate patina they offer at first glance.

The fact is that, during dinner, the secrets that seemed best kept pale and prove the English expression true: Everyone has a skeleton in the cupboard.

The conclusion we can draw is that few people are truly honest with others (not even with themselves, which is even more worrying) and that the devil is behind the mobile phone. What can set us free, uninhibit us, or allow us to write protected by a screen, can become our worst enemy, because as is well known, you are the master of your silences, but a slave to your words (and to your images on the internet).