ABSTRACT
Any twentieth-century practitioner concerned with popular theatre, its past forms and potential for new social significances, is bound to feel impelled to investigate the phenomenon of commedia dell’arte. Like many other actors, directors and drama teachers of my generation, my enthusiasm for Commedia, kindled by the writings of Meyerhold and Copeau, became a blaze in the late 1960s after seeing the production of Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters directed by Giorgio Strehler for the Piccolo Teatro of Milan; the resulting flames were for a while obscured by smoke from the work of Carlo Boso, but the fire has recently been stoked again by the teaching of Antonio Fava. After more than two decades of experimentation (for which I thank those students and young actors who have been so brave as to perform publicly work which was, strictly speaking, ‘in progress’), I am still, however, only able to offer an interim report rather than a conclusion to the investigation. The abiding question is in fact a composite one: to reconstruct from first principles or to repair a decayed tradition? Or to follow the initiative of Copeau, Mnouchkine and others and attempt a new form of popular masked comedy on a commedia dell’arte base, either ‘translating’ the original Masks into contemporary equivalents or inventing entirely new stock types? Or to join Fava in asserting that Commedia is an absolute form which can still be learned and which is able, through its empowerment of the actor as improviser, to be as contentious and satirical, scurrilous and rude, up-to-the-minute and unashamedly celebratory as it ever was? Or is it now best to think of Commedia techniques as a training form to place alongside other immutable disciplines (mainly from the east) as in the work of Eugenio Barba’s International School of Theatre Anthropology?
