The Diary Project
      REVIEWS

"It is hard to pick favourites but I think Roberta and Renato have given me more pleasure in the theatre then almost any other artist in Melbourne . These two make remarkable work, they make it quietly and beautifully. They have been making it in Melbourne and taking it to the world. They do to audiences everywhere what we all long for theatre to do: they confront us, they bring us into their lives to a point where we hardly can tell what is reality and what is fiction, but it is always theatrical, it is always a performance done with the incredible skills they have. They are the finest exponents we can possibly have. Melbourne should be extremely proud to have these artists making their work here.”

Robyn Archer
Director Melbourne International Festival of the Arts 2002/2004

Roberta Bosetti and Renato Cuocolo are there, on display, human works of art telling us their story. The two extraordinary protagonists from the international scene have become focal points of the city urban and human landscape. With our noses pressed against the window, we as spectators allow ourselves to be pulled into a dramatic and emotional context that is anything but voyeuristic, soothing reality show. A theatre which engages the flow of life in the far reaches of pure performances.
A show not to be missed.
Giuliana Manganelli Il Secolo XIX

Life without metaphors unraveling itself through the exercise of memory until becoming theatre. They construct with rigorous dramatical accuracy a text that is real, and at the same time belongs to stage fiction. An unusual show, profound and engulfing. Do not fail yourself. Do not fail to see it.
Stefano Bigazzi La Repubblica

  An amazing experience.
Renato Palazzi Il Sole 24 ore

A theatre of unusual intimacy,carefully scripted. Bosetti is a beautiful and deeply engaging actor. We are all drawn into a claustrophobic world in the hypnotic revelations of which we will happily surrender.
Helen Thomson The Age

The pair play themselves, with all that that implies: the script is crafted, each reading is a performance, but the edges of the staged and the sometimes uncomfortably real are blurred.
Subtly written and gradually build in dramatic intensity. Intriguing and unsettling.
Bill Perrett The Sunday Age

About IRAA

The other night I went to a performance that will join the store of experiences of performance art that I regard as its benchmarks of quality.

Bosetti's performance has the quality of sudden changing gear, suddenly switching from near-life naturalness to conscious emotion. We had shared an experience together and felt the connection of this emotional bond. Someone said that what he wanted from art was an experience that would make him feel different. This certainly did just that for me and I think for all of us.
Simon Blond The West Australian

In front of the spectator then appears an exciting kaleidoscope of theatrical inventions, a distant theatre where the empirical flow of linear time is replace by a more mysterious connecting of events. In the theatre of memory time has shrunk, past, present and future are co-existent.
Jan Kott Forum at Vienna International Festival

All things considered there are only two kinds of theatre in the world - that which reveals truth and that which reveals the existence of secrets. Renato Cuocolo's IRAA belongs to this latter category. For him theatre is travel, search, movement.
Bruce Chatwin

What Cuocolo achieves, is a palimpsest, a process of association, suggestion and echoing by means of which images and sound resonate, as if layered across space and time and cultures.
Maria Shevtsova Contemporary Performance University Lancaster . New Theatre Quarterly

Redefine your notion of intimacy. There is something astonishing about watching an actor of Bosetti's power and control at such close range. It's a suggestive and affecting work.The result is spellbinding,slightly haunting and deeply memorable.
Stephen Dunne The Sydney Morning Herald