Theatre: Tunnel vision

OUTSIDE an arched doorway in a sloping, cobbled lane off the Via Toledo, Andy Arnold – artistic director of the Tron Theatre – is standing in the middle of a small media scrum. There are three or four television cameras, some reporters scribbling notes, a couple of sceptical-looking theatre critics from Milan or Rome standing to one side. Among the crowd waiting in the doorway, a radio journalist moves to and fro, interviewing everyone willing to speak.

This is the press night of Monaciello, The Little Monk, the Tron Theatre of Glasgow's co-production with the newly-fledged Napoli Teatro Festival Italia; and although the audience is necessarily small – only about 15 people at a time can make the descent into the old underground tunnels of Naples where the show is set – the local interest seems intense.

"It's a bit unnerving," Arnold says cheerfully, "having a show that's a huge hit before anyone's even seen it." Then he wanders off to negotiate with the television teams, who want to carry their cameras down the 186 steps into the dark chambers and passages below, and film during the performance.

The level of interest is hardly surprising, though, given the intense connection between Arnold's show and one of the main aims of the festival, as conceived by its quietly determined artistic boss, Renato Quaglia. For what Quaglia seems to want, at the deepest level, is to use this festival to help give the city of Naples back to its people, both by disentangling some of the most disturbing threads of its recent history and by opening up and reclaiming unused physical spaces, all over the city, that have powerful historic and symbolic relationships with that history.

Arnold's show not only brings a wider public into the Sotteraneo, the fantastic network of tanks, channels and wells carved from soft volcanic rock that, for 2,000 years, kept every building in Naples supplied with its own source of water. It also retells a key 20th-century story, about how the Sotteraneo was used during the Second World War as a giant bomb shelter; and during an intense year or so of preparation, Arnold and the writer on the project, Megan Barker, have been in touch with dozens of people in Naples who have stories to tell of that extreme and horrifying time, creating a show – performed almost entirely in Italian and Neapolitan by a cast of five actors and musicians from Scotland and seven from Italy – that forges a powerful link between this Glasgow-based theatre company and the city where they have been working.

The show itself, when it comes, is necessarily brief at only 40 minutes, and more impressionistic than documentary. Instead of offering the reassurance of familiar 1940s war-movie imagery, Monaciello plunges us straight into an almost gothic world that evokes the subjective terror, and occasional human celebration, of people living through a nightmare, doomed either to betray or to be betrayed, driven to bizarre acts of horror in the quest for survival, and – in the case of the women – routinely forced to prostitute themselves. Those looking for straightforward history will be disappointed.

It's no accident that it was Arnold, 19 years ago, who opened up the Arches under Central station as a new "found space" in Glasgow, a city which used its year as European City of Culture in 1990 as an opportunity to recognise and acknowledge the grandeur and the pity of its own traumatic industrial history.

Now, Naples is visibly hungry for the same kind of recognition, the chance to retell its story in a wider context that can help to change meanings and to heal historic wounds; and Arnold has created a vivid and loving show that should play a vital part in that process.

Not every show in the festival takes place in a found space, of course. The other Scottish-based company in Naples, Matthew Lenton's Vanishing Point, are presenting their acclaimed international co-production, Interiors, at the little café-theatre Sannazaro in the main shopping street, famed for its former career as a porn cinema. And on a hot Tuesday night, in the conventional space of the Teatro Augusto, it was inspiring to watch the passionate solo performer, Giulio Cavalli, stride the stage for 70 minutes in his driven, brilliantly paced version of the political polemic L'Apocalisse Rimandata, in a version by Italian radical theatre veterans Dario Fo and Franca Rame, with furious projected images, drawn by Fo himself, of a self-inflicted human doomsday.

But it was in another "found space" – the great, crumbling central courtyard of the vast and notorious 18th-century poorhouse, the Albergo Dei Poveri – that I felt the huge potential civic energy of this festival building up again, as a packed audience on a huge rotating central seating rig found themselves gasping at the sheer visual spectacle and beauty of Chay Yew's Le Città Visibili, a massive festival co-production inspired by the work of Italo Calvino and co-produced by the Naples and Singapore Festivals.

The show is a surreal modern tale about links between the Italian fashion industry and hard-driven factory workers in China that has something to say about race and exploitation, but mainly just takes the breath away with its dazzling use of sound, light and big-screen visuals in one of the most grand and melancholy ruined settings in Europe. The night was warm, and the audience seemed thrilled; not only regaining a mighty space long hidden by the fear and shame of those once forced to live there, but also acknowledging the eternal human struggle against exploitation and oppression that forms part of the story of every city, and that becomes slightly easier to bear – or easier to bear with joy – when we recognise that we are not alone, and neither, in their conflict and complexity, are the cities in which most of us now live.

• Napoli Teatro Festival Italia runs until 28 June, with performances of Monaciello until 21 June, and of Interiors until 14 June.