But once again he saw her face, turned back toward him,
in a smile as clear as hope, a promise:
to return to him grown, from dark death,
to him, living…
Then he pressed his hands against his forehead, kneeling,
so as to see nothing more than that smile.

R. M. Rilke, Alcestis

Alcestis is the narration of a harrowing and tragic farewell between two lovers—a topos that runs through literature across all times and latitudes. A tragedy charged with immense love, it privileges the human dimension of the story, distancing itself from other mythic farewells, such as Hector and Andromache at the Scaean Gate, or the Shakespearean goodbyes. It is the tale of a farewell sealed by the most sublime of sacrifices—an adieu that becomes meditation and remembrance through the gestures and words of its silent protagonist.

Alcestis reveals to the viewer a nostalgic and melancholic horizon that recalls—more through the description of her figure and her actions than through her own words—the most moving farewells in literature: from Ariadne to Creusa, from Werther to Jacopo Ortis, from Emma Bovary to ’Ntoni in The House by the Medlar Tree, to Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Kafka, Neruda. In the farewell, an entire world recedes and survives only in the traveller’s desire. Day dies and the moon rises. Light withdraws, thin and fragile, announcing night.

The farewell narrated by Alcestis is the edge of a space, the threshold of a departure toward the unknown. In the presence of Admetus, within the landscape of familiar things, the shadow of an ultimate distance already insinuates itself: the infinite space that separates—an expanse not narrated by Euripides but merely evoked, empty and filled with deafening silence. A stretch of time impossible to define in terms of duration, extending from the moment Alcestis decides to leave the world of the living to the instant of her sacrifice. It is within this arc of time that the foundation of this creation lies: a silent monologue, a soliloquy on the essence of memory and on the profound truth of things, multiplied on stage through a plurality of performers.

Alcestis gazes nostalgically at the distant horizon behind her. A vertigo of memory. Her body sounds the Requiem of a lost elsewhere and holds the final breath that separates her from a new, unknown condition. From this threshold, she moves beyond the prison of forgetfulness and noise, into a poetic time—silent, suspended. A presence of emptiness.

Her language is fragmented, broken—now living voice, now echo of music and sounds from a farewell like so many others: the rustle of coats being put on to leave the house, the sound of a light kiss placed on the cheek, and finally the silent upbeat of the soul as it departs.