Federico Sangirardi Quinto di Wardal: Enter stage left. Exist stage right. Simply Merely players Profile by Nigel Ryan

photo: Randa Shaath

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Federico Sangiradi Quinto di Wardal with Federico Fellini and with Donald Sutherland in Fellini's Casanova

"Napoli is a very particular town in Italy. It means theatre -- all the people in Napoli, in the street, everywhere in the life, they make theatre."

It is one of the idiosyncrasies of Naples, Federico Sangirardi Quinto di Wardal believes, that makes it close to Egypt. As evidence for this contention he cites Sophia Loren. "You need only observe her movements, her gestures, to know she was born in Napoli and to feel the links, a shared temperament that crosses the Mediterranean."

Federico Sangirardi Quinto di Wardal is a striking figure. Neapolitans may well make theatre everywhere: it remains impossible, however, and despite protestations to the contrary, to allay the suspicion that they barely hold a candle to this actor. In one restaurant we twice change tables to avoid the eavesdropping of customers convinced they are paying for rather more than their supper. It is easy to believe this is not an uncommon occurrence.

But then the terms in which he describes his trade are hardly innocent: "I started to exhibit myself when I was 14 years old, in public performance. This was in Italy."

Such exhibition quickly became an article of faith.

"Me and the theatre? It was love. I love people, and seek communication. And I quickly observed that through the theatre people come to unmask. They may need the masks in life, but on stage they unmask. There is a very intimate connection between the actors on stage and the audience. I want always to find some truth in life. Time passes quickly, and sometimes we arrive at the point of death without ever having removed our masks, without ever having come to know what is true. And in this the theatre can help us by helping us see ourselves."

At 14 Federico was giving recitals. His first public performance included black American poetry and spirituals: "This was before Black Power. I wanted material that underlined racism, and I wanted to perform in Italy. There is a great deal of racism there, and it extends from those in the north and their attitude to Italians from the south."

Soon he was touring, this time with a performance comprising songs and poems from Italian folklore, staging the event in the squares of Italian towns. The process was one of uncovering a vocation and it would be pursued, the wheels oiled by applause, that great lubricant, and beyond the applause by a great many fortuitous meetings.

First with Eduardo de Filippo, actor, playwright and director, most famously of Filumena Marturano, the film adaptation of which starred Loren and Marcello Mastroani. He was, perhaps not coincidentally, born in Naples. The two worked together in Natale in Casa Capiello, which Filippo wrote, directed and acted. And with the actress and playwright Maria Theresa Albani. "It was she who taught me the psychology of character, using texts by Schiller and Shakespeare. Of course, I fell in love with her Hamlet. And with Pirandello, too, who was a friend of Einstein. I love the theory of relativity, of course."

"This is how I started in the theatre. It was ten years before I accepted to perform alone again, perhaps 15. Not before. I refused completely. I believe in strong experience, which is why I left Italy. I went to New York, and then I was in Paris for two, three performances, and then London."

Cue another fortuitous meeting, with the Italian poet Dario Bellezza.

"We met in Tunis. I was to perform some poems, and Bellezza was there. Later he wrote a performance for me, a theatrical adaptation of Turbamento, which was dedicated to me, and which I performed with much success."

They also worked together in Rome, in 1994, appearing on stage in Sotto il segno di Rembau, Bellezza's reworking of Rimbaud.

And then there was Federico Fellini.

"It was a magical meeting. When we met he looked me straight in the eyes, and I looked straight back. I don't know what he understood about me but he understood something. He was my first director in cinema."

"Whatever, he cast me as the young Casanova, opposite Donald Sutherland. The film moves between Casanova in old age, Sutherland, and the past: it is a dialogue between the past and present, between the young and old Casanova."

"Fellini was a remarkable man. He was always democratic, always incredibly kind to me. He was something of a father figure. My own father was a lawyer, and he didn't like my life in the theatre. He was very intelligent, but he was also very stupid. He did not approve of my being in the theatre, he did not think it important and he could not understand why it was important to me. But it is what I love. And I feel no duty to do the things I do not like. In my meeting Fellini there was immediate sympathy. And when I met his wife, Giulietta Massina, it was the same."

"My father was rigid, and he was jealous of Fellini. And because he thought he was my owner he forbade me from acting. He told me I could no longer perform, on the stage, or television, or cinema. But people do not own one another. My father, he was intelligent, but about this simple thing he was stupid."

The expression is reductive. It is matter of fact enough to cover a break that did not heal. It is over simple things that stupidity is at its most destructive. From which one might deduce a second, unspoken article of faith. Simple things are the things that matter. The formulation may be folksy but it is a truth that clearly counts.

Wardal and Federico: at some point in the conversation I become aware they refer to different things. Later, and the distinction is underlined. We are talking about some personal matter, an intractable problem, an affair of the heart. "Wardal, he could not solve it. Federico, maybe he could have made it work but at the time it was Wardal who was in the relationship. There was no room for Federico."

A lifetime's suspicion of those who refer to themselves in the third person -- you encounter them in greatest concentration in the worlds of performance -- has vanished before the salad is reached. And it is time to change tables again.

Wardal is a stage name, the result of the title granted to an ancestor, who subsequently styled himself Count of Wardal, by King Federik IV of Norway in 1709. For all its Ruritanian connotations -- is there a more stagy title than count? -- the appendage has proved more useful than simply providing an impressive mouthful of a name, facilitating a seemingly necessary division between stage and non-stage personas. Not that it is easy to determine where one ends and the other begins: that particular dotted line is far too porous to make for a clean cut; is too porous, eventually, to make much sense to anyone beyond the owner. He, though, insists there are times when Wardal enjoys ascendancy and there are times when it is Federico. I suspect I like them both.

Genealogy is, in any case, more than a matter of passing interest: the family Sangirardi Quinto claims among its ancestors not only Marc Antony but Emperor Titus Quinto Flaminius and, through the Quintia-Quinto dynasty, descent from Aeneas of Troy. Some families have skeletons lurking in the cupboard. Yet others pull out a god-hero. Which level of apparent rootedness might beg the question why this particular descendant spends so much time in Egypt. And why he chose to donate 1,500 antiquarian books from his family library to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

It is a result, predictably by now, of another fortuitous meeting.

"A painter, an architect, John Pappazian had a house in Rome. He was from Egypt, though, where he invited me to visit him. And before the aeroplane had touched the ground I began to sense a bond with Egypt. But that first visit we spent only a few days in Alexandria, and in Cairo, and then in Luxor. John died several years later, at which point I thought my connection with Egypt had been severed."

"It was by chance that I came back. I had told myself after the death of John that I would never see Egypt again. And then I met an Egyptian in Rome and he suggested that I write something about my experience in Egypt. At first I refused, but he persisted and finally I agreed and wrote a piece which I performed at the Cairo Experimental Theatre Festival. The audience enjoyed it, and I was in Egypt again but at the time I had a lot of work in Italy and I still thought that it would be difficult to renew my relationship with Egypt."

"I have to add that from my mother I have Spanish and Egyptian blood. But this is in the past. It is no reason to come to Egypt, or to Spain. The fact is that it is I who chose the countries I like, apart from any family ties."

"And then it happened that I was in Amman. In 1996 I had performed in Baghdad, a piece called Solidarity, with the actress Francesca Benedetti. The show was dedicated to peace, and we performed in the Babylon Festival, where it took first prize.

"A year later I returned to Baghdad, taking a recital of poems, some sung, some without music. It was performed in Italian and Arabic. That was a difficult visit. We had brought a lot of medicines, they were unavailable under sanctions, which we distributed to hospitals. And following that performance I was in Jordan, on my way back to Italy. But I wanted time to think about my life. I spent three months in Amman, and all the time I was thinking should I go to Cairo. But I told myself that Cairo had changed, that it would not be the Cairo I had known. That was not that long ago, but for me time is relative. Remember, I love Einstein. For me one year can be one century and one century one minute. This is my way of thinking. On almost my last day in Amman I decided to take a flight to Cairo. And Egypt was the same. And the Egyptian people were the same. I decided that the time had come that I should know Egypt for myself, know Egypt alone and not from friends."

A performance in Baghdad. Months of doubt in Amman. Flight into Egypt. It is a sufficiently dramatic sequence to suggest that, for a moment at least, Wardal is in the ascendant. But as quickly as the dichotomy arose it recedes. Wardal or not Wardal, Federico or not Federico, has ceased to be a question. Their repertoire is, after all, the same; it is simply that the gestures of one are either more or less expansive than the gestures of the other. Some gesture, though, was inevitable, and it took the form of the donation of books, worth several hundred thousand dollars, to the Alexandria library.

Life as theatre is a demanding metaphor: those who embrace it understand being as playing a role. And if all the world is a stage then surely it is big enough to contain an actor playing two parts, and playing them as nakedly, as unmasked-ly, as Federico Sangirardi Quinto di Wardal plays his. It might make some of the non-paying audience uncomfortable; others it will turn into eavesdroppers. Some might snigger. But these are complicated responses, the complexes of those who occupy another world. They are not simple things. They are not the things that matter.

On future projects he is reticent. There is a play, a reconstruction from fragments of Horace, Maktabet El-Eskandareya, that he is anxious to see in production. It places Horace, the Roman propagandist, alongside Cleopatra in an attempt to underline the former's betrayal of himself, of history and of poetry, to further Roman legitimacy in Egypt. It is a play, believes its author, with an increasingly urgent message, not least because it deals with the fictionalising of history, the most insidious, because the most permanent, of war's spoils. The play features an original score by Luca Spagnoletti, based loosely on Handel's Caesar and Cleopatra and the aim is to perform, initially at least, in Alexandria, possibly under the umbrella of Special Events Friends of Alexandria, a cultural association of which he is a co- founder.

There is South America, too: last year he directed, and with Lila Fernandez co- wrote, Guitarra dimelo tu, a homage to the Argentinean poet and singer Atahalpa Yupanqui on the 10th anniversary of his death. He has performed or directed in both Argentina and Peru, and it is a connection he seeks to expand.

"Peru has energy, and it is an energy very like that of Egypt. It comes from a people who have yet to forget their very distant history, from a people who have mixed, and who have absorbed traditions from beyond and yet remained themselves. It is positive, enormously positive, this energy, positive because it comes from people who have not yet forgotten simple things, people who, despite the enormous difficulties they face, still remember what is important."

"Every new work, every new performance, it is a risk, a great risk. It is a danger, and you must prepare, prepare hard, and lessen the danger, though the risk can never be eliminated. It is necessary work. There was a bad time, following the death of my mother. My father, he had tried to spoil my career, he was powerful, he knew many politicians, and politicians in Italy, they have fingers in television, and theatre, and cinema. I was depressed, I had no strength. Then, on a beautiful beach in Italy, I fell to talking with a woman and she asked me about my life, and I told her, I told her everything. And she told me, she said 'You are Wardal, you have to work with me.' And I asked her, 'But who are you.' And she said, 'I am a playwright, and a director, and I will write one performance about your life.' And my answer was no, please, the theatre for me is only a souvenir, something to remember. I cancelled the episode from my mind, but after one month she phoned me in Rome. She told me, you must come now to the rehearsal. I have rented a theatre, so come now. Finished. And I went, and we began rehearsals. And again I was on the stage, and the audience again they applauded me. And I decided to start again, in the theatre, because the audience they loved me -- do not doubt the audience, they are more than real -- and I knew, then, I loved the audience. It is so simple."