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There’s a particular kind of artist who doesn’t treat catastrophe as a single event but as a texture — something that clings to the skin, shifts underfoot, and quietly rewrites the stories we tell about ourselves. In A Dark Line Upstairs, Matilde Vigna braids together two floods separated by seventy‑five years and a continent: the night the Polesine vanished under water, and the slow, private deluge of a woman packing up her life after a breakup. What emerges is not a neat metaphor but a restless conversation between past and present, between inherited trauma and contemporary drift, between the places we flee and the ones we pretend we’ve outgrown. It’s a debut that refuses the tidy arc, preferring instead the unstable ground where humour, grief, privilege, and generational doubt all mix together. We asked some questions…
1. Your play threads together two floods — one literal, one emotional. When did you realise that the 1951 Polesine disaster and a modern woman packing up her life belonged in the same breath?
The Covid pandemic forced me (us?) to reflect on loss. With all venues closed and all live performance forbidden, I felt like I lost everything. At the same time, this feeling seemed ridiculous in comparison both to those who lost someone, and to the fact of actually, physically losing everything — as I knew had happened to the people living in the area where I was born, 70 years ago.
(An area I ran away from as soon as I could — as I did from many other places — which sparked another reflection on roots: where am I really rooted? Is it possible to put down roots if you’ve forgotten your own? Etc., etc.)
Coming back to tragedy, talking to the wise people I’m proud to call friends made me realise that many things can fall under that category. Packing up your life in your 30s, after a break‑up, might feel like you’ve lost everything, and every step forward might feel like ten steps backwards. So why not place the two tragedies together, like two legs that advance one after the other… without a clear conclusion or moral, seeding questions and leaving them unanswered.
2. The press release describes the piece as “powerful, poetic, and sharply comic.” How do you find that balance between wry humour and the enormity of losing everything?
I think it’s a matter of touching a delicate object like a tragedy with respect — which to me means not indulging in the dark shades, but pairing them with some light strokes. It’s a light‑design concept: after looking at a light, the black feels darker.
I might add that one can find humour in anything. Of course there are things you can laugh about straight away (like our character who leaves her flat taking everything with her, even a dead houseplant) and other things that require more time (like tying your furniture to the wall with a rope or carrying the pigs upstairs. You might not laugh about that in your lifetime, but it can make audiences smile 75 years later).
3. The 1951 flood swallowed 70 square kilometres of the Polesine region overnight. What part of that historical catastrophe felt most resonant with the instability of contemporary adulthood?
I really don’t have an answer to this question. I feel there’s something there, but like in the play, the two are placed next to each other without resolving the matter. I have many thoughts (do I not want to put down roots because I fear being swept away by a catastrophe?) but no clear answers.
4. Moving house in 2021 becomes its own kind of micro‑catastrophe. What personal experience fed into that portrait of cardboard boxes, breakups, and rising mortgages?
I don’t know if this counts as a pro or a con, but my writing is never about me (I think my life is too little — but then that’s why we act in the end, isn’t it?). Rather, it’s a mosaic of stories I heard and glued together. A sort of cultural appropriation of my friends’ lives, as an account of “my generation.”
At first I thought our contemporary, bourgeois, first‑world little issues were in no way a tragedy — not when compared to real tragedies. But then everything can be a micro‑catastrophe (especially when it rains, right?) even when you compare it to something bigger. What changes is that you can laugh about it (or at least the audience can).
5. You talk about “coming to terms with chaos and the things we cannot control.” What chaos in your own life shaped this piece?
I guess the chaos is very much a generational insecurity — our inability to come to terms with the life and beliefs our parents had, for whom progress = wealth. How can we live by that same equation when it’s so clear now that our lifestyle means trampling on someone else’s life?
Chaos for me now also means coming to terms with my privilege. The woman in my show doesn’t want to buy furniture for her new flat because she has married the immaterial, while her parents push her to buy stuff. Alright, but… she owns a flat! (and a lot of stuff, as we know from her endless lists).
I guess what I want to convey is something along the lines of: our parents’ paradigm is not working, we cannot find a better one, maybe we should go back to our grandparents’ paradigm and start again (cooking bread in a common oven).
6. The sound design by Alessio Foglia turns the bare stage into a physical soundscape. What moment in the show relies most on sound to carry the emotional weight?
All the lines relative to the 1951 tragedy are accompanied by sound. It might seem simplistic, as it’s a 1:1 thing: the past always has a soundscape, the present never does. Somehow it felt impossible to relay the tragedy through acting, so we subcontracted all the emotional dirty work to sound.
I mean, as I say in the play: I’m Italian! …so the risk of melodrama was just around the corner (we’re far from that, still: better safe than sorry).
7. This is your playwriting debut, yet it’s already been nominated for Best New Italian Play at the Ubu Awards. What surprised you most about stepping into the role of playwright?
I think the main thing is that I cherish the responsibility of choosing which topics and which words the audience will listen to.
Then I realised I like to play with words, as if they were pieces in a giant jigsaw puzzle — the musicality, the rhythm, the repetitions… and the way in which, if words are put together in a certain way, the performer doesn’t need to add anything. (That’s the great lesson we all get from Shakespeare, I guess.)
Of course A Dark Line Upstairs is not perfect, but I’m quite sure magic happens in the cracks — when the play is not airtight, when the audience can connect the dots and place the last piece of the aforementioned jigsaw puzzle.
8. The piece moves between past and present seamlessly. How do you guide the audience through those shifts without losing them in the undertow?
The first trick is in the writing. When we’re in the past, the language is more lyrical, whereas in the “present day” moments the storytelling leans towards stand‑up comedy.
But mostly, it’s a sound/lighting thing. We had to shrink the whole production to its “Fringe size,” but the concept remains the same: the narration proceeds without halting, while the sound creeps in… and by the time the audience realises we’ve switched “world,” we’re deep inside it.
9. ZOO Venues is known for championing contemporary international performance. What made it the right home for your Edinburgh debut?
It has been a combination of factors. I was looking for a small room (some venues only have 40+ seats) whereas ZOO Playground 3 was just what I wished for my first time at the Fringe. And of course, being the first time (and preparing for the Fringe is quite an overwhelming experience) I wanted someone who would take me by the hand.
Furthermore, some of my friends had already performed there, so let’s say that beside its fame, ZOO Venues had some “close‑to‑heart” references… and please let me spend a word to thank them all for everything they’re doing for us!
10. You describe the story as “deeply Italian yet universally resonant.” What do you hope Fringe audiences — far from the Po River — carry out of the theatre with them?
The story touches many topics: our relationship with our roots (our family, the place we come from); whether we can decide to leave or not; what happens when we do (does it change whether it’s 1951 or 2021?); what we hold onto in order not to lose ourselves…
Even though audiences might not know where the Po River is, or which shape our local bread has, all these topics are quite relevant today, regardless of where any of us has been born and raised.
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