TEATRO LIRICO GIORGIO GABER TILL FEB 09, 2025
“Il nuotatore di Auschwitz” “The Swimmer of Auschwitz”
Inspired by the true story of Alfred Nakache and the book “A Psychologist in the Lager” by Viktor E. Frankl
Alfred Nakache was a French swimmer of Jewish origin, holder of a world record. In Auschwitz he was prisoner number 172,763. Despite his imprisonment and unheard of privations, he never stopped training by diving into the freezing water of a reservoir. His strength, his unshakeable determination, allowed him to go through the horror of the camp and save himself. When he returned to compete, he achieved a new record and took part in the London Olympics. 
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, was also interned in Auschwitz. Immediately after the liberation, he wrote a book about his experience and about those who, just like Nakache, managed to overcome that terrible ordeal. The show aims to bring back these two extraordinary figures who communicate a message of hope to all of us: living is certainly also suffering, but seeking a meaning to this suffering by looking towards the future with a purpose is the way to face the hardest challenges that life presents us. In this way, it is possible to finally discover the very meaning of existence.
Raoul Bova acts as an intermediary to tell the story of the famous French swimmer Alfred Nakache and the Austrian psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl, both locked up in Auschwitz. Raoul dialogues with the audience, also strong in his own experiences as an athlete, bringing his own sensitivity and his own experience to the story. 
The scene around him becomes essential, composed mainly of lines of lights designed by Marco Laudando and which become the symbol of lanes in a swimming pool, of rails that transport souls full of pain to finally rise to perspective escapes in a tension towards the unknown, the absolute, the search for a spirituality more necessary than ever in an attempt to survive the brutality of the concentration camp. 
The scene is then enriched by images filmed by Marco Renda that immerse the spectator in abstract yet material and poetic spaces, in an essential black and white, non-places that are mirrors of the soul. Again, the show makes use of the original music by Francesco Bova that builds sound carpets rich in throbs and references, that envelop and sometimes disorientate the spectators, but always with the intent to involve and excite.
Because, if the story of an Auschwitz inmate inevitably brings us back to the many testimonies heard up to now, it is true that that of the swimmer Nakache stands out from these to become especially the emblem of a resistance carried forward and achieved with courage and stubbornness. A figure who, to fully emerge, however, needs his “double” – the scholar Frankl, – who analyses and theorises what the instinctive Alfred instinctively puts into action. In this vision Alfred and Viktor are each other’s mirror, they are two sides of the same coin and they merge in an experience capable of giving spectators the ultimate meaning of existence.
Adaptation and direction – Luca De Bei
Lighting design – Marco Laudando
Video contributions – Marco Renda
Original music – Francesco Bova
Assistant director – Barbara Porta
Costumes – Francesca Schiavon
TEATRO LIRICO GIORGIO GABER TILL FEB 09, 2025
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