Marco Baliani is not a performer capable of being anyone: he feels that he belongs to certain characters with powerful souls. Like Kohlhaas, the hero of Heinrich von Kleist who dies choosing his own condemnation, as well as Peter Schlemhil, the character of Adalbert von Chamisso who leaves outcast in the world without his own shadow anymore. Foreigners both, Baliani chose them for his most intense performances, where there was nothing but the power of the word, the power of the voice that tells and like a chisel sculpts figures. Kohlhaas and Schlemhil were thus joined by Meurseault, the stranger from Albert Camus’ novel, already recreated by Baliani for radio. Again an individual who does not recognize himself in the rules of a world we pompously call civilized, the man with the wounded soul, who wholeheartedly would like to feel that he is part of a society that instead expels and marginalizes him. “A wonderful and terrible contradiction,” says Baliani, “in which lies their sickness and their strength. In it, these heroes without heroism glimpse the mirage of an impossible peace, the promised land that recedes on the horizon, but which they would nevertheless always like to be present and friendly.” It is a feeling that Baliani tries to make palpable in the play, to which director Mario Martone has offered the contribution of his original film inserts “Camus’Lo straniero is one of those life stories that have long inhabited a special garden of mine, a place where I cultivate friendships and kinship and where I have been going for years drawing a secret map of references and treasures. In this garden Camus has put down roots of oak, deep, solid,” the actor adds.