The text is also concerned with shifting boundaries on a formal level. Though he doesn’t understand it himself, the narrator has become part of a postmodern world now shared by the audience which 1900 cannot. Though 1900 seems able to transcend the forms and frameworks which constrain his fellows (exemplified by his musical genius), ironically it is his own inability to engage with a changing and ever-larger world which leaves him sitting on a carton of dynamite as the ship is being scuttled after the second world war. Music is the conduit through which this theme is most obviously explored, but the entire work is infused with a sense of parameters and limitations. It is a text about boundaries: boundaries of understanding, boundaries of self-expression, boundaries of culture, economics, and nationality which define human beings within society (particularly that of the early twentieth century). Encompassing the images of industrialisation and social inequality which defined the modernist era, spanning the years including the two world wars and ending shortly after the latter, there seems little doubt that this life story tells more than the narrator is even conscious of. Though in English ‘1900’ is just a number, in Italian, ‘novecento’ can also mean ‘twentieth century’ (as it did in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1976 epic movie). His name is given to him by the engineer who finds him as a baby, marking the year it happens. He seems at one with the ocean and at peace with himself in a way which touches the lives of those who come into contact with him or merely hear tales whispered of him on dry land. His piano playing is quite unlike anything ever heard before, a form of free expression which goes beyond even the boundaries of jazz.

Raised initially by engineers in the bowels of the ship, the boy demonstrates a singular talent for music at age eight, and he becomes an on-board entertainer. It is a sort of modern fable, a tale told by a narrator who is also part of the story about an enigmatic man who is born at sea and spends his entire life on a passenger liner.

With the aid of director Gabrieile Vacis, it made its stage debut at the Asti Festival that same year. Novecento, to give it its original title, was written in 1994 by Italian novelist and essayist Alessandro Baricco as a story/monologue for the actor Eugenio Allegri to perform. I hesitate to call it a play because even its creator does not. 1900 is an interesting evening’s theatre.

Novecento alessandro