Arlecchino in Cairo
Giorgio Strehler's vintage production of Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters strikes Nehad Selaiha as a nostalgic fairy tale
In November, 1994, at the Stadthalle, Mulheim, in Germany, I watched the premiere of the Theater an der Ruhr's production of Carlo Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters. One look at the stage and I was almost convinced I had strayed into the wrong theatre. Visually, there was nothing to connect it with Goldoni's world -- a gray, metallic set, featuring the basement of some grand hotel, leading to a car park, with many lifts, whizzing up and down at frantic speed all the time, gambling and snooker tables hung over with low lamps and people in 1920s suits with suspenders, shod in spats. The text had been extensively adapted by the company's resident dramaturge, Helmut Schafer, and transposed to New York and Mafia circles, with an expatriate Turkish Kurd actor in the titular role of the servant. Masterminding the whole operation was Italian-German director Roberto Ciulli, the founder of the company. No classical text is safe when Ciulli is around. He uses them as material for improvisation with his actors, subjecting them to drastic interpretations, what you could call a process of systematic gutting out, and occasionally pits them, in a kind of ferocious cockfight, against other literary or historical material. His purpose in all this is to come out at the end with a politically relevant script that touches the audience on a raw nerve and reflects his and his actors' vision of the world around them. This has been the practice of the company for many years and though the results may not always be to everybody's liking, they are invariably exciting and provocative.
I cannot pretend I liked Ciulli's version of The Servant at the time; it struck me as too harsh and grim and too much of an adulteration. I missed all the joy and colour one usually associates with Goldoni's plays -- the sense of a world ultimately, and in spite of the most horrendous complications, at peace with itself and capable of resolving its conflicts. But the impact of that show was, nevertheless, tremendous. It was as if Ciulli and his dramaturge and actors had done to the play what King Lear had wanted to do to Regan: to anatomise her to see the evil that breeds round her heart. They had rent the glossy surface of the play to bare the facts of cultural, racial and class oppression that underlie the position and funny antics of Arlecchino (or Truffaldino -- as he is called in the play). From then on I could never revisit The Servant, La Locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn), or any of my favourite Goldoni plays without the shadow of that wistful, Kurdish Arlecchino coming between me and the action and sending me off on a perilous deconstructivist course.
The world-acclaimed production of Arlecchino servitore di due padroni by Il Piccolo Teatro di Milano-Teatro d'Europa, directed by Giogrio Strehler and starring the magnificent Feruccio Soleri (which visited Cairo last week in the context of the Italia- Egitto, 2003-2004 cultural event), did its best to cure me of this deconstructivist malaise which I had long resented. It attempted to recover for the audience the beauty, unadulterated humour, innocent charm and sunny cast of mind they have traditionally come to expect of the play. The elements Goldoni borrowed from the commedia dell'arte -- the disguise which leads to many entanglements, the mock duels, the complicated plot with a last- minute revelation that saves all, the galloping rhythm, the improvised jokes and, of course, the stock figures of Pantalone, the sentimental lovers, the clever, flirtatious soubrette, and Arlecchino (Truffaldino) -- as both primum mobile and comic butt -- were all there in their reassuring conventional forms, masks and costumes. The show unfolded in the smart and comfortable Gomhouriya Theatre smoothly, hilariously, reassuringly, with everyone gasping at the wonderful craftsmanship of the performers, thrilling to their singing, applauding their nimbleness and agility, their masterful command of stylised acting, and feasting their eyes on their colourful, gorgeous costumes. For me, however, it felt like a merry marionette show, taken out of cold storage, regarnished, and offered for consumption as a light soufflé easy on the digestion. Nothing to irk, disturb or unsettle here; just pure entertainment.
And what is wrong with that? Nothing, except that it calls the very concept of pure entertainment into question. Can one really dissociate oneself from the reality around one and take a holiday through theatre into some imaginary, far-off land? What a relief if one could, and I did try. Strehler's vintage piece, however, started to pall after a while, feeling more and more, as the minutes ticked away, and despite all the performer's gusto and vivid clowning, like a museum piece rather than living theatre. What kept me in my seat was an absurd feeling of loyalty to an old, less fortunate tribe of actors -- a feeling that by staying there I was somehow paying homage to the struggling, wandering artists who had given the world, long ago, from the mid-16th century onwards, the art on which many countries have founded their comic, theatrical traditions, including England and Egypt -- namely the commedia dell'arte.
Think of Francesco Andreini, who was famous for his role as the Capitano and published the material he had created for the character in Il Capitan Spaventa della Valle Inferna (Captain Fearsome of the Infernal Vale), then followed it, in 1611, with a collection of 50 scenarios of the comedies presented by his touring company under the title Il Teatro delle Favole Rappresentative. His wife, Isabella Andreini, was also a famous actress and poetess who, according to Italian theatre scholar, Clelia Falletti, "wrote refined and passionate rhetorical works which supported her roles on stage". Isabella died in child birth, in 1604, in Lyon, France, while on tour.
"She had seen many countries and given birth to many children while travelling," Falletti writes in her inspiring article "The Inaccessible Mountain" (Open Page Journal, no 7). Of Isabella's 11 children, only her first born, Giovan Battista, carried on the tradition and founded, with his wife, Virginia Ramponi, one of the most prestigious commedia dell'arte companies in the first part of the 17th century. Virginia Ramponi's stage name was Florinda and one of her most famous stage parts was as Florinda in Lo Schiavetto, the young woman who disguises herself as a slave- boy (which is what schiavetto means) and roams the world to track down her errant lover, earning her bread by performing in public squares, side by side with thieves and quacks. When in her final speech, Florinda, the character, describes the ordeals and risks she has suffered on the road, she is not, according to Falletti, speaking only "of the vicissitudes the character in the comedy has to confront, but also ... of her life as an actress." For in the commedia dell'arte tradition, an actor's life was inseparable from his or her profession.
The lives of those early Italian actors were arduous and dangerous. The companies travelled far and wide across Italy in the space of a few months, sometimes pushing into France, Spain, England and Russia, and the perils they had to face, as Falletti records "were, therefore, many and diverse, particularly for a young and beautiful actress whose only protection was the fragile company of her fellow performers." An added burden was the bad reputation that stigmatised actors at the time. "Actors and charlatans were both regarded very negatively by the censors -- not without reason," Falletti adds, "as in reality they formed a single group and there was constant exchange between the two categories." Nevertheless, it was those long dead actors who have evolved for us, through their difficult everyday reality, their perilous travels and incessant struggle for integrity, many of the comic routines and conventions, stock situations and character types, that still sustain theatre in many countries right now. Falletti ends her essay with a moving tribute to them -- to those "people who chose the freedom of the profession of wandering actors".
I remembered her tribute as I watched Soleri performing Arlecchino and wondered whether, with all acclaim and the comfortable life-style the actors of Il Piccolo Teatro di Milano are enjoying today, he was really a chip off the old block.
