'One Man, Two Guvnors' (PBS)

 

The Public Broadcasting Service announced that it would broadcast Richard Bean’s Tony Award-winning comedy One Man, Two Guvnors as an episode of Great Performances.  I didn’t see One Man live when it was on Broadway, so I watched the Great Performances broadcast that night.  Since the New York theaters have been closed since March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, I decided to write up my impressions of the performance for Rick On Theater just as I would do for a live show. 

One Man, Two Guvnors had its television première on the evening of Friday, 6 November 2020, on Great Performances, the PBS anthology series dedicated to the performing arts.  The video, part of the program’s “Broadway’s Best,” is actually a live performance recorded in 2011 by London’s Royal National Theatre and released as National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors, produced by David Sabel and directed for the screen by Robin Lough. 

National Theatre Live is an initiative of the National Theatre which broadcasts performances of the theater company’s productions (and some from other theaters) live via satellite to cinemas and arts centers around the world.  (Except for the ensemble, who were cast in New York, and one featured role, the cast of the National Theatre video is the same as the opening-night Broadway cast.)

One Man is an English adaptation of The Servant of Two Masters, a 1745 Commedia dell’arte-style farce by the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707-93; see my ROT reports “The Servant of Two Masters (Shakespeare Theatre Company, 2012),” 9 July 2012, and “Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters (Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 2005),” 29 July 2012). 

Richard Bean (b, 1956) was born in East Hull, a port city on the Humber estuary in Yorkshire, near England’s east coast.  He studied social psychology at Loughborough University in Leicestershire (about 105 miles south of Hull), and then worked as an occupational psychologist. 

Bean worked in a bread plant for a year and a half after leaving school.  This was the setting for his second play, Toast (1999; see my report on ROT on 19 May 2016), which I saw as part of 59E59 Theaters’ Brits Off Broadway.  (There’s a bit of a biography of the playwright in that report.)

Between 1989 and 1994, Bean also worked as a stand-up comedian and went on to be one of the writers and performers of the BBC Radio show Control Group Six which was nominated for a Writers Guild Award.  (Control Group Six, a series with an experimental format that interspersed unrelated sketches in an unfolding storyline based on a dark-tinged, futuristic thriller, ran in two series in 1995 and 1997.)

One Man, Two Guvnors opened under the direction of Nicholas Hytner (Tonys for the 1994 Lincoln Center revival of Carousel and the 2006 Broadway début of The History Boys—which also featured James Corden, the lead in One Man) at the Royal National’s Lyttleton Theatre on 24 May 2011, closing on 19 September. 

It toured the United Kingdom for five weeks in September and October and then opened at the Adelphi Theatre in the West End on 21 November and ran until 25 February 2012 when it transferred to the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 2 March; the London production of One Man closed on 1 March 2014. 

The show won Best Play at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for 2011 and was nominated for a 2012 Olivier Award: for Best New Play.  One Man went out on a second UK tour in 2012 and ’13 and an international tour in 2013.  Then it had a third UK tour in 2014 and ’15.

A Broadway mounting premièred at  the Music Box Theatre on 18 April 2012.  The limited engagement concluded on 2 September, a run of 159 regular performances, and received seven Tony nominations; Corden won a Tony Award for Best Actor In A Leading Role In A Play.  One Man was also nominated for and won three Drama Desk Awards: Outstanding Actor In A Play (Corden), Outstanding Featured Actor In A Play (Tom Edden), and Outstanding Music In A Play (Grant Olding). 

In addition to the National Theatre Live video (and now the PBS broadcast), Fox Searchlight Pictures and Damian Jones have signed on to produce a feature film adaptation of One Man, Two Guvnors.  Oli Refson is writing the screenplay.  Though no casting, including the lead role of Francis Henshall, has been announced, playwright Bean and stage director Hytner will serve as executive producers.  No release date has been announced.

According to a BBC News report, Bean had to change parts of the play for a U.S. audience before it opened in New York.  For instance, the author remarked that he had to rewrite all the cricket references because we Americans don’t understand them.  He indicated some other local jokes that he felt wouldn’t go over on this side of the Atlantic were also replaced.

“But Bean, a former stand-up comedian, promises that the changes won't be too drastic,” added reporter Tim Masters, who interviewed the playwright for the British Broadcasting Corporation.  “The reason that the play works,” explained Bean, ”is that it is end-of-the-pier British comedy and obviously we’re not going to destroy that.”  He was referring to the bawdy, old-fashioned style of broad comedy provided by British music halls, often located at the end of the pleasure piers in seaside resorts.

The PBS broadcast is the London edition of the play, so the British jokes, of course, hadn’t been excised.  There are indeed several jokes, some of them extended or recurring, that must have made more sense to the Brits in the house (who laughed uproariously at every one) than they did to me.

One example was Lloyd Boateng (Trevor Laird), Charlie’s friend from Jamaica’s repeated references to Parkhurst.  Lloyd says that was where he learned to be a chef (he owns a pub that “does food” and is catering the party that opens the play) and where he learned about “true love.”  Well, obviously it’s some place where those experiences wouldn’t be expected and it must be a place where it would be incongruous for them both to occur. 

I guessed correctly, but I had to look it up to be certain: the reference is to Her Majesty’s Prison Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight, once one of the toughest jails in the British Isles where many notable criminals were incarcerated.  A Brit would obviously know this without recourse to Wikipedia; it’s not as funny if you have to look it up later.

Playwright Richard Bean reset One Man in the British seaside resort town of Brighton in 1963.  The plot centers on an out-of-work musician named Francis Henshall (James Corden, currently the host of CBS’s Late Late Show), recently fired from his skiffle band, who becomes a bodyguard/minder for Roscoe Crabbe, a petty East End crook.  

Little does Francis know that Roscoe, supposedly in Brighton to collect £6,000 from his fiancée’s father, is actually dead and his twin sister, Rachel (Jemima Rooper), is now masquerading as her brother, killed by her boyfriend, Stanley Stubbers (Oliver Chris).  (Is everybody following this?) 

There’s a repeated joke about whether Roscoe and Rachel can be “identical twins” if they’re of different genders.  It’s a mark of the intelligence of many of the characters that they can’t comprehend this distinction.  (One character even discourses on the scientific difference between monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins.  Now there’s an apt topic for low comedy for ya.)

To complicate matters even more, when the perpetually ravenous Francis sees the chance for an extra meal ticket, he takes on a second job with Stanley, an upper class twit who’s hiding out from the police and waiting to be reunited with Rachel.  To prevent discovery, Francis must keep his “two guvnors” apart, an increasingly difficult predicament as the two are both staying in the same pub named The Cricketers Arms, resulting in farcical mayhem.

Roiling events still further is local mobster Charlie “the Duck” Clench (Fred Ridgeway), who had arranged the engagement of his daughter, Pauline (Claire Lams), to Roscoe despite her preference for over-the-top amateur actor Alan Dangle (Daniel Rigby).  (So, an over-the-top actor in an over-the-top farce.  How does Bean come up with this stuff?)

(By the way, I tried to find a British slang explanation for calling someone a “duck,” but I was unsuccessful.  The context seems to be that Charlie’s cheap—a skinflint and chiseler—and Lloyd says of him in one exchange, “Man!  They don’t call you ‘Charlie the Duck’ for nothing!  Tight man!”)

Even more complications are prompted by several letters, a very heavy trunk, a number of unlucky audience “volunteers,” an extremely elderly waiter named Alfie (Tom Edden), and Francis’s pursuit of his twin passions: food and drink, and Charlie’s “women’s-libber” bookkeeper, Dolly (Suzie Toase).

One Man got James Corden a Tony (2012’s Best Performance By An Actor In A Leading Role In A Play) and led to his gig as the host of The Late Late Show.  (I only watched the first show of TLLS and decided I didn’t like it—or Corden—so I haven’t followed it.)  I didn’t much care for the play—it was like a semi-literate Benny Hill sketch (i.e., not Monty Python!  Or even Fawlty Towers). 

I’ve blogged before on TV versions of plays—The Originalist, for one (see my report on ROT, 17 July 2017), before I saw it live—so this isn’t unprecedented.  I also actually like silliness—as ROTters may have noticed in my reaction to Something Rotten! (see my report, 14 May 2016), plus my report on A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder (16 October 2014), which had me howling in my seat!—but I draw the line at that really low humor the Brits love, but which makes me cringe.

(“That real bottom-of-the-barrel English humor is an acquired taste, I think,” my friend Kirk Woodward said to me when I told him my thoughts on writing up the performance of One Man, “based mostly on the fact that Pat [Kirk’s late wife], a deep-dyed Anglophile, didn’t like it either.”  My sense of the British taste for “knickers humor” isn’t so much that it’s “acquired,” but that it’s something its fans never grew out of. 

(Why the land of Shakespeare, Milton, Shaw, and Eliot has such a love affair with that knickers stuff is a mystery to me.  They still do Punch ’n’ Judy shows and—have you ever seen a “panto”?  They’re a combo of juvenile and prurient.  I say it’s a case of national arrested development.  That’s just MHO, of course.)

One example of what I mean—Bean’s frequent not-so-subtle allusions to sex.  One of Charlie’s party guests is his lawyer, Harry Dangle.  He’s the father of Pauline’s fiancé, Alan.  His law firm is Dangle, Berry, and Bush.  In addition to the puerile references to a man’s groin and genitalia (I hope I don’t have to spell that out for you!), there’s the added frisson of “Dangle, Berry” sounding awfully close to ‘dingleberry.’  Enough said?

(It’s not as if One Man, Two Guvnors is an all-out, sex-obsessed knickers farce.  It’s not.  Chris and Rooper find themselves hobbling around near the end of the play with their pants down around their ankles—but the joke is more about watching them try to walk around the stage with their trouser down than seeing them in underwear.  Earlier, Chris does make an entrance shirtless—but what’s supposed to be funny there is that he’s wearing a rug both on his chest and his back!  Both bits are more silly than funny—but, again, that’s just me.)

I found Bean’s Commedia travesty self-indulgent and the script a pastiche of bits from crusty old British farces that reminded me mostly of the Carry On franchise of 1958-78 with its bawdy  music-hall humor—right down to the casual homophobia, racism, sexism, ageism, and xenophobia. 

Bean points his insult gun at a wide range of topics, including women (and men), actors, The Beatles (especially Ringo), lawyers, cops, boarding schools and boarding school alumni, gays (and lesbians), religion(s), and old people. 

At least in passing, the play pokes stereotypical fun at foreigners like Spaniards and Italians, and countries like Canada (boring) and Japan, but Australia, where everyone apparently loves opera, comes in for the most frequent jabs. 

By the way, the Aussie’s obsession with opera is a new one on me; I’d never heard that about them.  What’s more, the juxtaposition of Australia and opera doesn’t seem nearly funny enough to merit three mentions.  Must be a Brit thing.

The problem is that while Bean’s parodying dated and bigoted tropes, he’s also perpetuating them.  It’s a shame because at the time he was composing One Man, Europe in particular was embarking on a rapid descent into xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, and anti-refugee politics that soon caught on here as well.  We have just debarrassed ourselves of a president who based his appeal and many of his policies on those sorts of forces.

What the play celebrates (if that’s the right word) is stupidity and ignorance.  The frequent refrain from Pauline Clench is a confused “I don’t understand!” and after one such cry, Alan, her beloved, declaims, “This is why I love her.  She is pure, innocent, unsoiled by education, like a new bucket.” 

The idea of a woman so empty-headed it renders her irresistible is surely a conceit we don’t need to go back to.  (See what I mean about the Carry On flicks and Benny Hill humor?  In case I didn’t make myself clear: I’m not a fan of Benny Hill and his genre of imbecilic “comedy.”)  But Pauline’s not the only example of this gambit. 

Her father’s the one with the difficulty over identical and fraternal twins, and Francis, the title character, isn’t terribly swift upstairs, either.  (“You’re not exactly a Swiss watch, are you,” says Stanley, one of Francis’s guvnors, to him—though that product of a British public school isn’t terribly bright himself.)

I thought stupidity as a virtue went out with the Three Stooges (whom I admit, I could never stand, even as a little boy).

I have to say, despite my obvious distaste for the play—Goldoni ought to be spinning in his grave, along with Giorgio Strehler, the Italian director whose métier was classic Commedia farce, especially Servant of Two Masters—the stage work was quite good.  It doesn’t hurt that the British have always been good at physical comedy; we Yanks have only caught up some in the last couple of decades or so.

There was a lot of physical humor in One Man, just as there would be in a Commedia dell’arte performance—pratfalls, stunts, faces, mime, and more—and it was all handled very well.  Hytner and his physical comedy director, Cal McCrystal, put the actors through their paces.

One of the best-performed bits was a tumble Francis takes right at the top of the show.  When James Corden enters, he tosses peanuts in the air and catches them in his mouth.  On his last toss, he back into an armchair which topples over backwards, taking Corden with it.  After a second or two, up he pops, announcing, “I got it!” and sticking out his tongue with the peanut upon it.  (Obviously, the last bit of this gag only really works visually on camera.)

There’s a caveat here, though.  I felt that almost all the physical turns, which were contrived and stock (as they were in Commedia dell’arte as well, of course), were also gratuitous.  They barely connected to the plot—they were “set pieces,” routines that could have been dropped in almost anywhere, and in any farce irrespective of plot. 

The best bit of physical acting was performed by Tom Edden as Alfie the ancient waiter in The Cricketers Arms.  Alfie’s 87, a World War I vet, and has nearly every frailty you can imagine: he’s deaf, suffers from tremors, has a balance problem, wears a pacemaker—and it’s his first day on the job.

Edden’s made to look like a cross among Boris Karloff, Marty Feldman as Igor in Young Frankenstein, and Christopher Lloyd as Uncle Fester in The Addams Family.  He performs spectacular pratfalls as doors are slammed into his face and he goes from zero to 60 in nothing flat when his pacemaker is turned up to 9.  

He does an almost unbelievable tumble that goes from teetering in the edge of the top step with his back to a flight of stairs to almost falling on his face on the landing—and just as we think he’s going to recover, he swivels and falls headfirst down the stairs (out of our sight, of course).

But he ought to have won his Drama Desk Award  for one gag alone: his slow, jittery cross with an empty soup bowl with a spoon in it on top of a plate from the serving table at center stage to the door to the dining room at stage left—raising such a clinking, clattering racket that before he can reach the door, Francis grabs him, opens the door, and shoves Alfie into the room just to stop the noise.  Talk about your coup de théâtre!

All the actors are good at the direct address to the audience, which is used a great deal in One Man—the breaking of the fourth wall.  They all do it well, but Suzie Toase’s Dolly uses it best.  Her character’s a stock mid-20th-century farce figure, the man-hungry woman, but Bean imbues her with a kind of wisdom no other character in One Man possesses. 

Toase uses the direct address exchanges as little lessons she aims at the women in the audience (but which have significance to the men as well).  Her asides seem more part of her character than those of the others; theirs somehow seem like shifts in gear.

Corden, however, is the master of ad libs and interaction with the audience.  One Man has a lot of audience participation, including three spectators who are brought onto the stage.  He handles the ad libs with complete confidence, as if it’s all scripted and rehearsed—and as if it isn’t the most terrifying thing an actor can be asked to do.

I’ve had occasion to have to improvise with fellow actors on stage—when something goes amiss and we had to cover—and I can tell you that every time it happened, my heart was in my throat and every minute that passed until we got back on track creeped along at a 10 to 1 ratio: one minute of real time seemed like 10 minutes inside my head.  Having to improvise with a member of the audience is scarier still!

In one bit, Corden brings two young men up to help him move a heavy trunk,  He’d done a solo attempt to lift it to no avail.  In the banter, after setting up the gag, Corden asks the two men, “Have either of you two got your Equity card?” He’s referring to the membership card for the British actors’ union, formerly officially titled the British Actors’ Equity Association.  Of course, neither man was a union member, it was just banter and everyone chuckled.

But whenever I see a bit like that in a show, I always wonder what would happen if the spectator was a union member?  What would the actor do if the “volunteer” pulled out his Equity card as Corden asked?  What would he do?  What would the stage manager do?  It’s just a fantasy I have—but I wonder if it’s ever happened.

Not all the volunteers get off so easily as Jess and Corey.  Take Christine, whom Corden brings on stage at the end of the first act when he’s frantically serving dinner to his two guvnors, each in a different dining room off stage while he’s in the middle trying to wait on them and steal food for himself from their orders.

Poor Christine is pushed around the stage, at one point shoved under the serving table.   She’s soaked with water when a crèpe Suzette flames up out of control (intentionally), and then she’s sprayed with fire extinguisher foam.  Finally, she’s led off by a stage manager, soaking wet and covered in white foam.

She has to be a plant—no one could treat an actual spectator like that and not get sued or even arrested for assault.  Christine’s dress was probably ruined—at the very least it would cost a lot to clean it.  But if she’s an actress planted in the audience for this scene, she’s excellent at playing the surprised and unwitting civilian, and sounding like a non-professional when she speaks.  I have no idea.

I can say, it made me uncomfortable to watch this all unfold.  I certainly left the play for quite a while as this went on.  I’m not sure that’s a good outcome.

As you can probably tell from the Drama Desk Award for Music in a Play that One Man, Two Guvnors is a play with music.  (Yeah, I know—Duuh!)  Don’t mistake that with a musical, in which the songs and dialogue are integrated (hopefully) and the music helps move the plot along.  In One Man, the songs are interludes—they aren’t character- or plot-driven and they’re mostly sung by singers outside the narrative of the script.  (They are joined occasionally by actors from the play—but not characters.)

In this case, the singers and musicians are a pop band led by Grant Olding, who also wrote the music and lyrics.  (He won that Drama Desk Award.)  Since Francis Henshaw was a member of a skiffle band, The Crave, as Olding (or Bean) named this combo, is appropriately also a skiffle band. 

(I won’t give an elaborate definition of skiffle music, but it’s an old American folk tradition that was given a revival in the U.K. in the late 1950s and early ’60s.  Some of the instruments played by a skiffle band are homemade or improvised; Francis, for instance, had been a washboard player before he was fired.  The Beatles, some of you may know, began as a skiffle band, first known as the Quarrymen, in the late 1950s.)

The Craze is made up (in the video; it was changed in the Broadway mounting) of Olding on lead vocals, guitar, keyboards, accordion, and harmonica; Philip James on guitar, banjo, and back-up vocals; Richard Coughlan on double bass, electric bass, and back-up vocals; and Ben Brooker on percussion including washboard and spoons, drums, and back-up vocals. 

Except when they need more room on stage and the bass and drums move below the platform, stage right, the band plays “in one” in front of the closed front curtain.  Dressed in skinny mauve suits (let’s remember the year in which the play’s set—who remembers Carnaby Street?), with Olding wearing Buddy Holly glasses, The Crave stand behind mikes that rise from the stage and sing during scene changes.

The lyrics comment on, but don’t reiterate, the characters and, to a lesser degree, plot developments of the play.  They sort of capture the mood of the play at that moment.  I confess that to my musically un-learned ear, the tunes largely sound repetitive, serving mostly as time-fillers.

After the first number, the combo was joined in succeeding songs by Corden on a small xylophone (he seems quite adept) and then Martyn Ellis  (who plays the lawyer Harry Dangle) on uke and vocals.  Ellis actually does a solo until he’s joined by Daniel Rigby (Alan) accompanying him with body percussion (he slaps his chest with his open hands).

Claire Lams, Suzie Toase, and Jemima Rooper (Pauline, Dolly, and Rachel), in blond bouffant wigs and early ’60s crinoline dresses do an Andrews Sisters-/ McGuire Sisters-style number and finally, Oliver Chris (Stanley Stubbers) performs a solo horn-honking routine on a dozen small brass bulb horns mounted on a rack.

Because National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors was an international broadcast, reviews were published all over the world.  I’m going to try to sample a range of outlets, since all the reviewers saw the same performance, and we’ll see if there are any differences in regional or media-type coverage. 

(I’ll be particularly curious to see how Australian reviewers felt about One Man, considering how many times playwright Bean branded Down Under as a “terrible godforsaken place.”  A Sydney Morning Herald story reported that Bean turned down the application of an Australian theater company to produce One Man, Two Guvnors because of the jokes at the country’s expense.

(“If it’s Australian actors doing that material it’s not going to work,” explained Bean, “but if Australian audiences see English actors doing it, they’ll understand it and it will be fine.”)

Here’s a survey of selected reviews from around the world and across the country.  I’ve restricted myself to reviews of National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guvnors rather than the live presentation at the Lyttleton.

In The Times of London, Clive Davis watched the streaming version of the NT Live performance.  When his companion began to lose interest in the production before the end of the first act, he confessed that “to be frank I could understand why.”  James Corden’s “insane energy is what carries the convoluted storyline,” Davis judged..

“Even so,” he wondered, “can’t you have too much of his popeyed rants and hyperactive clowning?  This is a comedy that starts with the dial turned up to ten and never looks back.”

The Times writer continued: “At nearly three hours including an interval, it’s also much too long,” adding, “The musical interludes could all be ditched.” 

Davis acknowledged, “I didn't particularly enjoy this production,” but he pondered: “Would I have laughed more if I had been sitting next to flesh-and-blood people rather than my cat?  I'm not sure I would.”

Also from London, The Arts Desk’s Aleks Sierz dubbed the play a “gloriously silly farce . . . starring the irrepressible and Tony-award winning James Corden.”  In the scene in which Francis tries to serve his two guvnors dinner at the same time while keeping them apart from one another, Sierz felt that “the show’s slapstick reaches a pitch of intensity that is both viscerally funny and mind-bogglingly imaginative, with great comic work by Tom Edden as Alfie.”

“The show’s typical edginess means that we are encouraged to laugh at this oldie’s disability,” pointed out the reviewer, “which is disturbing as well as hilarious.  As in most classical farce, pain is funny—and we giggle so as not to cry.”

Corden’s “boyish charm . . . makes his incompetence charming as well as ridiculous” and his “confident bonhomie is particularly evident in the audience participation sequences.”  Sierz also parcels out praise for Rigby’s Alan, Chris’s Stanley, Rooper’s Rachel, Lams’s Pauline, and Toase’s Dolly.

The review-writer proclaimed Hytner’s production “dazzlingly brilliant” and added kudos to associate director Cal McCrystal who staged the clowning “to magnificent effect,” making it “satirical, bawdy and crowd-pleasingly funny.”

Matt Roush, writing for TV Insider, an online newsletter published by NTVB Media (which also puts out TV Guide, among other publications), called One Man, Two Govnors a “side-splitting farce” upon watching the PBS broadcast, and proclaimed Corden “a slapstick virtuoso.”

“Running himself ragged as Francis, . . . Corden dominates the stage with his tireless physical and verbal comedy,” wrote Roush.  “Highbrow it’s not,” the reviewer admitted, “but just try to contain the belly laughs when he’s joined by the miraculous . . . Tom Ed[d]en as a doddering ancient waiter.”

Roush observed, “Though based on a play from the commedia dell’arte era, the rhythms are pure vaudeville, with corny jokes, hammy overacting and campy musical interludes.”

“[I]f you were to ask me . . . what were the two funniest performances I’ve seen over too many years of playgoing,” mused Steven Suskin on New York Stage Review, “I would have an instant answer.  One was given by Phil Silvers, at an underpopulated matinee of the 1972 revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.”

“The other,” continued Suskin, “a 2011 performance which nine years and some 400 (?) shows later still sets me laughing as I type this, is that of James Corden in Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors.”  Suskin first saw the Bean farce in London, but relished the chance to see it again when it was live-streamed.  (He went on to see it twice more in New York.)

“I was pleased and somewhat surprised to find that nothing was lost in the [transfer to the screen],” expressed Suskin.  “You did not have that same thrill of live theater, which in the case of One Man included Corden pulling volunteers and watercress sandwiches out of the orchestra seats,” acknowledged the reviewer.  “But the broadcast worked just as well, with the closeups on screen amplifying the power of the physical humor and stoking the overall hilarity.”

Touting the April 2020 broadcast by the National Theatre over the Internet, Suskin advised “those of you with an interest in comedy might do well to watch One Man, Two Guvnors twice or thrice this week.  I mean, what good is sitting alone in your room. . . if you can spend the hours laughing?” 

The NYSR writer is obviously a Fan—with a capital F—of James Corden.  “I won’t even try, at this point, to describe Corden’s performance,” affirmed Suskin.  “He was all over the stage, all over the floor, juggling plates and characters and plotlines with such voraciousness and such relish that you (and the thousand other customers) gave up on decorum and laughed yourself past exhaustion to exhilaration.”

“James Corden might not be a vaccine for the coronavirus pandemic,” declared Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune, “but he . . . sure is therapeutic.”  He went on to characterize Corden’s turn in One Man as “so consistently hilarious that you might just fall off your couch and knock out the dog with your tumbling laptop.”

Continuing with his healing theme, Jones added, “They should be piping this glorious thing into hospital wards with the oxygen.  Laughter heals, folks!  And, yes, you can snort and guffaw right into your mask.”

For what Jones dubbed “one of [the National Theatre’s] greatest hits of all time,” Hytner mounted a “rip-roaring production” that “nods not just at Commedia but British pantomime and American vaudeville, with Corden a presence both retro and contemporary.” 

Jones concluded that One Man “might not be the funniest thing you ever saw, but it will be right up there, I promise, and at just the right moment.”

Apparently, at least as far as the NT Live production is concerned, the Aussies just overlooked the jibes at their homeland.  I found two reviews of the streamed performances, and neither one even mentioned the Australia jokes.  (I didn’t examine the reviews of the London production’s tour of Australia or the two or three local productions—it seems that Bean’s reluctance eased later and he allowed Australian companies to stage the play.)

In the Rock City Jester of Canberra, Australia, John Lombard labeled One Man Two Guvnors, “a fizzy farce set in the swinging sixties.”  Characterizing the production as “hilarious,” Lombard reported that Bean “spices the elaborate plot by making the monied patriarchs of the [Commedia] original into genteel mobsters.”

With a “sublime” cast “with irresistible energy, immaculate timing and crafty character observation,” director Hytner, the reviewer affirmed, “tells the story with panache, wisely anchoring the comedy in aching longing.” 

Lombard found, “The sense of time and place is extraordinary, with cockney accents [they’re actually northern English accents], popping primary colour costumes and slight rattiness in set perfectly evoking 60s Brighton.”

The review-writer also felt the skiffle band The Craze “are the cherry on top of the sundae, with their musical interludes adding tremendously to the sense of fun and place.”  Lombard concluded by asserting that the “National Theatre’s One Man Two Guvnors is a banquet of entertainment.”

Nary a mention of the Australian put-downs!

Two Productions by Eminent 'Auteur' Directors from the Archive

 (Part 2: Artist Profiles)

[For an explanation of the origins of this post, I refer readers to Part 1 of “Two Productions by Eminent Auteur Directors from the Archive,” published on Saturday, 10 October.  What follows is freshly written, but it harks back to the two performances I saw at the Lincoln Center Festival in July of 2005.  Although one of the directors profiled below, Giorgio Strehler of Il Piccolo Teatro di Milano, died in 1997, the company he founded is still producing and still internationally esteemed. 

[Ariane Mnouchkine is still working at 81 and, like Piccolo Teatro, Le Théâtre du Soleil, is also still acclaimed for its unique theater style.  As I asserted in Part 1, the very fact that I got to see the work of both these artists and companies here is proof to me that New York City is the capital of the world—at least as far as the arts are concerned.] 

ARLECCHINO, SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS
by Carlo Goldoni
Piccolo Teatro di Milano—Teatro d’Europa
Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
22 July 2005

CARLO GOLDONI

Born in Venice in 1707, Carlo Goldoni is considered one of Italy’s most prominent playwrights.  He was theater-obsessed from an early age, despite efforts by his father to redirect his life.  He eventually studied law and clerked in the small town of Chioggia near Venice; it became the setting for one of Goldoni’s comedies, Le baruffe chiozzotte (“The Chioggia scuffles”), considered one of the classics of Italian theater.

Goldoni made his theatrical début with Amalasunta, a tragedy produced in Milan in 1733.  The play was a critical and financial flop.  Goldoni returned to his inn and threw the manuscript of his first play into the fire.

When productions of his other first works, including his first opera, Belisario (1734; not to be confused with Gaetano Donizetti’s 1836 opera), were not received well in Milan and Venice, Goldoni decided that the Italian stage needed to be reformed. 

Abandoning 17th-century neo-classical theatrical traditions and the improvised buffoonery of commedia dell’arte, Goldon developed a comedy of manners inspired by the people he knew and enriched by his critical observations of the society of his time.  His comedies demonstrate a sharp eye for the difficulties, paradoxes, and injustices of life. 

L’uomo di mondo (“The man of the world”), his first real comedy, was written in 1738, and after several drafts, Il servitore di due padroni (Servant of Two Masters) was first performed in 1747.  Between 1750 and 1751, adopting Molière (1622-73) as his model, Goldoni wrote 16 “new comedies,” comedies of representations of actual life and manners through the characters and their behaviors (as distinguished from the commedia dell’arte conventions of masks, lazzi, and intrigue), which together are considered to represent a manifesto of his theatrical ideas.  (For further information on commedia dell’arte, see my brief discussion below.)

Goldoni worked with the Teatro San Luco in Venice for nine years (1753-62).  Throughout his career, however, he was attacked by rivals who never accepted his theatrical innovations.  After a dispute with fellow dramatist Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806) which left him disgusted with the taste of Italian literati, Goldoni left Italy in 1762 and joined the Comédie Italienne in Paris. 

The playwright died in Pais in 1793 at 85 after several years of illness, which he describes in his autobiography, Mémoires (1787).  Among Goldoni’s 120 plays are La putta onorata (“The honorable maid,” 1749), La locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn, 1751), Il campiello (“The campiello” or “The small square,” 1755), La trilogia della villegiatura (The Holiday Trilogy, 1756; see my report on this play mounted by the Piccolo Teatro, on Rick On Theater on 27 July 2009), I rusteghi (The Boors, 1760), Sior Todero brontolon (“Sior Todero grumbles,” 1762), La baruffe chiozzotte (1762), and Una delle ultime sere di Carnovale (“One of the last evenings of Carnovale,” 1762). 

COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE

Commedia dell’arte (which translates as "professional theater") developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, first in Italy and then in other parts of Europe.  This transgressive form of improvised comedy relied on the physical and verbal dexterity of actors who played scenes based on canovaccio, a basic plot or scenario accompanied by a few instructiions on how the comedy should be performed. 

Commedia performances were outdoors, often in the town square where the players set up a wagon that served as the troupe’s stage.  (The troupes were itinerant.)  Sets were minimal and stock, props were only what was needed for the action and often conventional, like slapsticks and bladders.  Actors wore masks and costumes identified with stock characters that audiences immediately recognized, such as foolish old men, devious servants, or braggart soldiers.  

Most masks had exaggerated features to aid in improvisation and help identify character and personality.  Behind the masks, actors relied on their voices and gestures, rather than facial expressions, to demonstrate feelings and emotions.  (I have a post on masks in theater, “The Magic of Masks,” on ROT on 17 September 2011.) 

Conventional gestures, phrases, exclamations, and curses were an essential part of the actors’ performances.  Extended comic riffs, called lazzi, frequently interrupted the action, giving actors an opportunity to display their improvisational skills.

Though the scripts were almost entirely improvised, the troupes sent company members into the town in advance to spy out the current gossip and get intelligence on prominent citizens and community leaders.  The scenarios would be adjusted on the fly so that topical foibles and scandals would end up in the plays.

(A secondary benefit of the masks most commedia actors wore in performance was to hide their off-stage identities from affronted townsfolk who might seek reprisals for insults and revelations made during the plays.)

Italy’s commedia troupes travelled throughout Europe, influencing theaters in Spain, Holland, Germany, Austria, England (Punch-and-Judy puppet shows; Shakespeare), and, especially, France (Molière).  In the 18th century, Goldoni, for instance, used and revised many of the theatrical  conventions of commedia, writing complete play texts and turning conventional character types into more rounded and credible human beings.  (See comments on Goldoni’s “new comedy,” above.)

Arlecchino was one of the best-known characters in commedia, with his cat-shaped mask; multi-colored, diamond-patterned costume; and constant scheming.  Il Dottore (Dr. Lombardi in Arlecchino) wore an almost-entirely black costume, including the academic robe of a Bolognese scholar.  His mask, which covered only his forehead and nose, had a small mustache and eyebrows.

Pantalone’s costume was typically tight red pants with a matching shirt, a long black cape, pointed shoes, and a belt with a purse dangling conspicuously from it.  His mask included a pointy beard and long nose; it sometimes also had a mustache and bushy eyebrows. 

Brighella wore a servant’s suit of rough fabric and a long shirt.  His mask had a hooked nose, beard, and mustache.  The Lovers (here Silvio, Clarice, Beatrice, and Florindo) wore whatever the latest local fashion was.  They didn’t usually wear masks.

In addition to particular costumes and masks, the characters in commedia dell’arte traditionally spoke specific dialects that indicated class distinctions and regional differences, as well as reflected defining qualities of the original stock characters.  For example, as a symbol of the wealthy merchant class of Venice, Pantalone spoke with a “pure” Venetian accent that was emphasized when he conducted business. 

The original zanni (or jester) character that was the basis for Arlecchino was a servant from the countryside of northeast Italy, near Venice; therefore he spoke a rougher, less polished form of the Venetian dialect used by Pantalone.  Although an innkeeper rather than a servant, Brighella was also based on a zanni character and used a dialect similar to Arlecchino’s. 

Il Dottore, however, spoke in a Bolognese dialect to indicate that he was a learned man from Bologna, where one of the oldest universities in Italy is located.  As a professor of law and medicine, Goldoni’s Dr. Lombardi often mixes his Bolognese dialect with his own versions of Latin phrases, creating an often comic manner of speaking. 

In contrast, the Lovers (and Smeraldina in Arlecchino), all spoke an older form of Italian (from the 18th century) that’s more elegant than current conversational Italian but that would be familiar to a contemporary Italian audience.

GIORGIO STREHLER

Affectionately called “Il Maestro” by his European audiences, Giorgio Strehler was one of the most celebrated directors of the 20th century.  Born in 1921 in Trieste, at the head of the Bay of Trieste on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, Strehler graduated from Milan’s Filodrammatici Drama School (literally, Academy of amateur dramatics) in 1940. 

He interrupted his career to join the Resistance movement in World War II and, in 1944, Strehler was captured and imprisoned by the Nazis and the Fascists.  After being exiled to Switzerland, he began staging plays in French, making the theater his home.

Strehler returned to Milan after the war and founded the Piccolo Teatro (‘little theater’), Italy’s first public theater, in 1947 with Paolo Grassi and Nina Vinchi Grassi.  During his 50 years as artistic director of Piccolo Teatro, Strehler developed a theater that was formally rigorous, politically committed, and open to as broad an audience as possible. 

Over the course of his career, he directed some 200 plays and operas in Milan, Rome, Paris, and Salzburg.  In addition to Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters, seminal productions include Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, William Shakespeare’s King Lear and The Tempest, Goldoni’s Il campiello, Luigi Pirandello’s Mountain Giants (I giganti della montagna), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera and The Good Person of Szechwan. 

Strehler’s opera credits include Giuseppe Verdi’s Falstaff, Simon Boccanegra, and Macbeth, as well as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don Juan, Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro), The Magic Flute, and Cosi fan tutti.

Strehler, always active in politics as a socialist, was also a member of the European Parliament (1983-84) and a Senator of the Italian Republic (1983-89). 

Strehler died of a heart attack during rehearsals for Così fan tutte in Lugano, Switzerland, on Chrsitmas night, 1997, at the age of 76.  The opera was to have inaugurated the Nuovo Piccolo Teatro (New Piccolo Teatro) in Lugano, the largest city in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland where Strehler had maintained a home for some years.

IL PICCOLO TEATRO DI MILANO

Piccolo Teatro di Milano (Italian for “little theater of Milan,” so named in homage to Moscow’s Maly Theater—which also means “little theater,” in contrast to the “big” Bolshoi Theater), founded by Strehler, Paolo Grassi (1919-81), a theater manager and director, and Nina Vinchi (1911-2009), Grassi’s wife, in 1947, was one of Italy’s first artistic ventures after World War II and its first public theater (also called “permanent,” as opposed to private companies, which were itinerant).  Grassi was its general manager and Strehler was artistic director.

Piccolo Teatro soon became known as an “art theater for everyone” (teatro d’arte per tutti) producing distinctive work at a price that everyone could afford.  Strehler staged numerous classical works, from Shakespeare to Goldoni to Chekhov, and many of the greatest works by 20th-century dramatists, including Brecht, Sameul Beckett, and Pirandello. 

Strehler’s productions have toured to more than 40 countries around the world.  The artistic excellence and community orientation of Piccolo Teatro has become a model followed by many other Italian theaters.  In 1991, Piccolo Teatro was designated a Teatro d’Europa and joined the Union of European Theatres, an international organization that encourages cultural exchange among theaters across Europe.

After Strehler’s death in 1997, Sergio Escobar, manager of renowned opera houses in Bologna, Genoa, and Rome, and international director Luca Ronconi, were appionted to lead Piccolo Teatro.  (Ronconi died in 2015.  Playwright Stefano Massini is currently the artistic consultant of the Piccolo Teatro.)  

With its three theaters, the Teatro Strehler, the Teatro Studio, and the Teatro Grassi, Piccolo Teatro is one of Italy’s most important cultural centers, producing some 600 performances each year.  In addition, since 1999, Piccolo Teatro has hosted an international theater festival showcasing productions from around the world.

*  *  *  *

LE DERNIER CARAVANSÉRAIL (ODYSSÉES)
conceived by Ariane Mnouchkine
Théâtre du Soliel (Paris)
Damrosch Park, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
27 & 29 July 2005

ARIANE MNOUCHKINE

Ariane Mnouchkine, born on 3 March 1939 in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, a western suburb of Paris, is the daughter of Russian-born French film producer Alexandre Mnouchkine (1908-93) and Jane Hannen, daughter of British actor Nicholas Hannen.  (Alexandre Mnouchkine named his production company Les Films Ariane for his daughter.)

Mnouchkine attended Oxford University in England to study psychology, but then joined the Oxford University Drama Society and decided that that’s what she wanted to do.  She continued her theater studies at L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, a school of physical theater in Paris, where in 1964 she founded Le Théâtre du Soleil (“Theater of the sun”) with some of her fellow students.

The leader of the Théâtre du Soleil has developed her own works, like the political-themed 1789 (1970), which dealt with the French Revolution, as well as numerous classical texts like Molière’s Don Juan and Tartuffe.  Between 1981 and 1984, she translated and directed a series of Shakespeare plays: Richard II, Twelfth Night, and Henry IV, Part 1.  

While she developed the shows one at a time, when she finished Henry IV, she toured the three together as a cycle of plays.  Similarly, she developed Iphigenia by Euripides and Aeschylus' Oresteia (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides) between 1990 and 1992.  Together, the four Greek plays became Les Atrides.

A Mnouchkine production has been notable for the choice of subjects the director addressed, often providing food for thought on the human condition.  These subjects often present dramas that are shocking or have upset the planet to make theater a means of shedding light on the history of our time: fundamentalism in Molière’s Tartuffe, political cowardice in Tambours sur la digue (“Drums on the dike”), refugees in Le Dernier Caravansérail. 

Her pieces are especially distinguished by her very visual staging; her famous moving sets present the scenes from different angles, for example.  The performances are supported by an omnipresent “soundtrack,” often played live from the edge of the stage by the one-man-orchestra, Jean-Jacques Lemêtre, with whom Mnouchkine’s been collaborating since 1979.

While mainly a stage director, Mnouchkine’s been involved in some films.  Her movie 1789, filmed from the live production, brought her international fame in 1974.  In 1978, she wrote and directed Molière, a biography of the famous French playwright for which she received an Oscar nomination.  

She collaborated with Hélène Cixous on a number of projects including La Nuit miraculeuse (“The miraculous night”; film, 1989) and Tambours sur la digue (stage, 1999; film, 2003), two made-for-television movies.  She also has screenwriting credit for L’Homme de Rio (“The man from Rio”), 1964.  In 1987, Mnouchkine was the first recipient of the Europe Theatre Prize.

In 1992, Mnouchkine criticized Euro Disney Resort as a cultural Chernobyl and was very opposed to the decision to open the European branch of the theme park in Paris.

On 20 May 2009 (playwright Henrik Ibsen’s birthday), Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, the head of the selection committee, announced at the Ibsen Museum in Oslo, Norway, that Ariane Mnouchkine was the second winner of the International Ibsen Award.  The prize, awarded for bringing new artistic dimensions to the world of drama or theater, was given to the director at a ceremony at the National Theatre in Oslo on 10 September 2009.  

Two years later, Mnouchkine received the Goethe Medal, given to non-Germans “who have performed outstanding service . . . for international cultural relations.”

Mnouchkine’s recent productions have included Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 2014; Une chambre en Inde (“A room in India”), created by Mnouchkine and Hélène Cixous in 2017; and Kanata – Episode 1 – The Controversy, created in collaboration with Canadian Robert Lepage’s production company Ex Machina (Quebec City) in 2018.

Also in 2018, Mnouchkine was awarded two Molières, the French national theater honor often compared to the Tony Award in the U.S. and the Laurence Olivier Award in Great Britain.  Her production of  Une chambre en Inde won for the best show of the subsidized theater/public theater.  The director won an individual Molière as the best director of a public theater show for the same production. 

Last year, Mnouchkine was awarded the Kyoto Prize, Japan’s highest private award for lifetime achievement in the arts and sciences, for her work as “a stage director who has innovated theatrical expressions through her original masterpieces for over half a century.”

LE THÉÂTRE DU SOLEIL

Founded in Paris in 1964 by Mnouchkine and a group of actors and technicians from L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Le Théâtre du Soleil combines socio-political activism with a collective sensibility.  The collaborative creation of original works is the hallmark of this company that consistently functions like one large family that lives together and equally shares the work of creating its productions.  The collective shares daily meals together, often with the attending audience.     

Mnouchkine has summarized the philosophy of the troupe as “Theatre du Soleil is the dream of living, working, being happy and searching for beauty and for goodness . . . .  It’s trying to live for higher purposes, not for richness.  It’s very simple, really.”

The company consists of close to 100 actors, technicians, and designers from throughout the world, speaking about two dozen different languages among them.  Included in this collective, for instance, are mask maker Erhard Stiefel and musician Jean-Jacques Lemêtre, composer and interpreter of the music for the productions, who’ve worked for the company for over 40 years, as did scenographer Guy-Claude François until hs death in 2014. 

Mnouchkine has directed scores of productions with the company.  Inspiration has come from major historical events like the French revolution and the partition of India, as well as from epics of world literature such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Gilgamesh, and the Mahabharata.. 

The work of the Théâtre du Soleil is a mixture of Asian-based and Western influences.  Mnouchkine feels that Asian theater (music, dance, masks, and puppetry, among other techniques) is a fundamental art form and she uses this influence in her overall concepts.  She also emphasizes physical theater and improvisation, almost certainly because of her training with Lecoq, a world-renowned physical-theater and mime artist and teacher.

One example of drawing inspiration from non-Western performance was in the collective’s production Tambours sur la Digue in which they incorporated puppetry in the style of Japanese Bunraku.  Les Atrides took the classical Greek tragedies of Euripides and Aeschylus and staged them using the costumes, make-up, and conventions of East Indian theater forms, particularly Kathakali.

Commentary on current events at home appeared in the Théâtre du Solieil’s production of Molière’s Tartuffe in which the title character was presented as an Islamic zealot at a time when there was a movement in France against foreign immigration.  Le Dernier Caravansérail (the topic of the second half of Part 1 of this post) was a look at the worldwide refugee crisis that was especially prominent in France at the time (2003).

The company’s productions have included re-imaginings of classics of Western theater such as works of Shakespeare and Molière, but the Théâtre du Soleil is equally well known for its original works. The collective, under the direction of Mnouchkine, works together in a collaborative rehearsal process that stretches over many months to create a performance.  Les Atrides took over two years to complete.

Théâtre du Soleil’s productions are often performed in found spaces like barns or gymnasiums because Mnouchkine doesn’t like being confined to a typical stage.  (The troupe’s first production was mounted in a basketball court.)  Similarly, she feels theater can’t be bound by the “fourth wall.”  When audiences enter a Mnouchkine production, they’ll often find the actors preparing—putting on make-up, getting into costume—in their presemce.

Among their most influential performances are the collective creations 1789 and L’Age d’or (“The golden age,” 1975); the historical and epic plays written by Hélène Cixous, including L’Indiade (1987), L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge (“The terrible but unifinished story of Norodom Sihanouk, king of Cambodia,” 1985), La Ville Parjure (“The perjured city,” 1994), Tambours sur la digue; The Shakespeare Cycle (featuring Richard II; Twelfth Night; Henry IV, Part 1; 1980-84); Les Atrides (based on the Oresteia by Aeschylus and Iphigenia by Euripides, 1990-92); and Molière’s Tartuffe (1995).

Théâtre du Soleil’s first visit to the United States occurred at the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles in 1984, where they performed The Shakespeare Cycle.  The troupe made its New York City début for the Brooklyn Academy of Music at the 14th Regiment Armory in Park Slope in October 1992 with the U.S. première of Les Atrides.  Other New York apparances include the North American première of Le Dernier Caravansérail and the U.S. première of Les Éphémères (“The ephemerals” or “Ephemera”) at the Park Avenue Armory as part of the 2009 Lincoln Center Festival.

The company has also created several films, including 1789 (based on the play), Molière, ou la vie d’un honnête  homme (“Molière, or the life of an honest man”; official selection, International Film Festival, Cannes, 1978), Au soleil mème la nuit (“The sun shines even at night”; documentary of Tartuffe rehearsals, 1996-97), and Tambour sus la digue (based on the play).                                                                           

Since 1970, the company’s permanent home has been an old, spacious Paris munitions factory, La Cartoucherie (cartouche is French for ‘cartridge’).  The Théâtre du Soleil performs at the Cartoucherie, in the Vincennes area of the city, as well as on tour in France and abroad.  The company’s rehearsals are open to spectators and the troupe encourages visitors at La Cartoucherie.

'Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters' (Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 2005)

[On 9 July, I published my report on a production of Carlo Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters at Washington, D.C.’s Shakespeare Theatre Company. That production was an adaptation by playwright Constance Congdon, first performed by Hartford Stage in 1996. In 2005, I saw an older interpretation at the Lincoln Center Festival, a 1947 version, called Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters, originally staged by the internationally renowned Italian director Giorgio Strehler, the founder of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano who died in 1997. As a contrast to the STC production, originally presented in 2010 at the Yale Repertory Theatre, I’m publishing my seven-year-old report on the Lincoln Center performance. Even though Goldoni’s play is a classic, you’ll see that the interpretations of his 270-year-old script are quite different. (The second part of this report, which I have deleted here, covered the LCF performance of the Théâtre du Soliel’s Le Dernier Caravansérail, staged by Ariane Mnouchkine.)]

The Lincoln Center Festival is a clear and unambiguous representation that New York City gets more and a broader variety of cultural events from all over the world than, I believe, anywhere else on the planet. (I’ve never done a survey—and I’m not aware that anyone else has—but unscientifically, I think that’s so. For theater alone it seem to be true, but if you add in opera, dance, and music performances, and then count all the visiting visual art exhibits—New York City is the capital of the world.) In July 2005, I saw the Piccolo Teatro di Milano’s Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni and Le Dernier Caravansérail by Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil. Both productions were fascinating experiences, and both had serious flaws as productions despite extraordinary performances.

The Piccolo Teatro di Milano, founded by Giorgio Strehler in 1947 as one of the first cultural endeavors of post-WWII Italy, experienced the throes of rebirth when Strehler died in 1997 at 76,. The Piccolo turned to two men to preserve Strehler’s vision: opera house manager Sergio Escobar and the experimental theater director Luca Ronconi. Through the continuity of artists like Ferruccio Soleri (who restaged Strehler’s Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters this year), a member of Piccolo’s company since 1958, the troupe’s been able to keep up the work Strehler began, maintaining the Piccolo as a home to the classics and the works of the great writers of the 20th century like Beckett, Brecht, and Pirandello, becoming known as the “Theater of Art for Everyone.” Strehler took a less innovative view of the classic plays the Piccolo presented than contemporary auteur directors like Araine Mnouchkine, reviving the plays’ spirits and relevance without reinterpreting their milieux or texts. The Piccolo’s production of Goldoni’s Trilogia della Villeggiatura, for instance, is staged as an 18th-century comedy even if the energy and dynamic of the cast is as modern as David Mamet. Strehler, and now his successors, put an emphasis on the physical work of actors—Strehler was a specialist in commedia dell’arte—and that’s in evidence in Arlecchino. Mnouchkine, in contrast, re-envisioned the Greek plays that tell the story of the House of Atreus as quasi-Kathakali dramas for Les Atrides and reset Tartuffe in the Middle East. Strehler guided the Piccolo for 50 years; In the theater, that’s a lifetime of leadership.

The Piccolo Teatro ‘s three-hour production of Arlecchino, originally staged by Strehler in 1947, is his take on Goldoni’s 1743 farce, The Servant of Two Masters—itself an adaptation from the previous century’s commedia dell’arte scenarios. Strehler stripped the text down to allow more improvising by the cast, returning the play to its commedia roots. (I’m going to assume a certain familiarity, if not with Goldoni’s classic, then the basic facts of commedia. Like that genre, the plot of Arlecchino is virtually irrelevant—just a frame to hang hi-jinks and verbal play on—so I won’t bother to recount it. Suffice it to say that it involves mistaken identities, scheming servants, plotting parents, separated lovers, and everything, in fact—as someone once said—that makes life worth living! From what I gather, both from reading reports and watching, the improvisation came during rehearsals and conception. The performances are choreographed tightly and, obviously, verbal improv wouldn’t allow the supertitles to follow the dialogue closely, which they apparently did.) In order to focus attention on the lead character, Strehler slightly renamed the play, which has been in the Piccolo’s repertoire for nearly 60 years (and over 2000 performances in 40 countries, according to their count). This production has been staged by Ferruccio Soleri, who’s played Arlecchino for more than four decades and, at 75, is still doing it. That’s one of the most remarkable aspects of this event—Soleri, under his mask, takes on the frisky, scheming clown like a man of . . . oh, I don’t know, maybe 35 at the most. He’s astounding, to put it mildly. (I had read Charles Isherwood’s 22 July review in the New York Times beforehand, so I knew Soleri was 75, but when he took off his mask at the curtain call, it was still a mini-shock. I had really forgotten while he was working how old he was.) The whole cast, as a matter of fact, is perfect. (There’s one guy—Paolo Calabresi, who plays Il Dottore—who I swear is either a giant or the rest of the cast is shrimps. He looks immense. I’d guess his huge belly is padding, but he isn’t wearing stilts or lifts, so his height is real, and he towers over everyone else on stage!) And the concept of reproducing commedia, with its little street stage (representing the commedia wagon bed), flat painted scenery, the actors “off stage” sitting or standing on the Alice Tully Hall stage to the right or left of the commedia stage as they awaited their entrances, the musicians and stage hands mostly visible—and sometimes engaging the actors in arguments when something doesn’t go “right”—the inserted lazzi, and the songs into which the actors break at the drop of a hat during scene changes, is delightful and, from my limited knowledge of theater history, wonderfully accurate.

I’m going to take a short (?) side trip here and delve into a topic Isherwood brought up in his review: the connection of commedia, especially as depicted here, with contemporary comedy. If you don’t already know it, or haven’t really seen it beyond reading about it in some theater history treatise, you can absolutely see where our common comic practices on TV and on stage originated. Isherwood mentions Homer Simpson, but I don’t watch that so I can only take his word for the reflection—but Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Chaplin, Martin and Lewis, Peter Sellers, Monty Python, Laugh-In, That Was The Week That Was, and Saturday Night Live: they’re all in there. This production even makes liberal use of an actual slapstick, the comic device (that dates back to Roman comedy, I think—a progenitor of commedia) that gave its name to a whole genre of modern (?) Western silliness. (The circus clown is, of course, a direct descendant of the zanni Harlequin/Arlecchino, followed by the Red Skeltons, Jackie Gleasons, Jerry Lewises, Lucille Balls, Carol Burnetts, Jim Carreys, among others After watching Soleri, I’m also convinced that Chico Marx was Arlecchino’s great-great-great-. . .-grandson! Not to mention Ed Norton and even Barney Fife—who were more like his great-great-great-grandnephews.) What’s amazing is that it’s still all hilarious! I’m not even a great lover of clowns—none of those performers I just listed are favorites of mine (except maybe Burnett)—and even though you know what’s coming most of the time—the routines haven’t changed in centuries—the execution by true masters like Soleri makes them seem fresh and surprising, even though they’re really not. Possibly the funniest scene in the play—one you could easily imagine Chaplin doing—is the one in which Arlecchino simultaneously serves separate dinners to his two masters at Brighella’s tavern. Soleri juggles the dishes and trays, tumbles and pratfalls, balances and dances in every direction, dodging the tavern keeper and his servants—never spilling a drop or dropping a platter! (It gives entirely new meaning to what we used to call at summer camp “running the biddie”!)

I made a brief reference above to the set, which is sort of bifurcated. The Piccolo Teatro’s set (designed by Ezio Frigerio) is an evocation of a town square, not quite realistically presented—there are awnings which resemble birds’ wings or ships’ sails—in the middle of which is a small raised platform that is the commedia playing area. At the rear of the platform is a frame on which are hung four pairs of painted curtains which represent another town piazza with the front entrances of several houses (Il Dottore’s and Pantalone’s), a large room in Panatolone’s house, the interior of Brighella’s tavern, and a Venetian street by a canal. As the scenes change, the stage hands simply step up on the platform and draw back or close the appropriate drapes to reveal the new locale. Off the sides of the platform, on the original Tully Hall stage, are waiting areas where the actors prepare for their entrances, the stage hands idle until they’re needed, and the musicians sit with their instruments. (There’s also an old fellow sitting stage right with a large book, obviously the text of the play or the instructions for the scenario. He’s either supposed to be Goldoni or a prompter—Michael Feingold in the Village Voice says he’s the prompter; I don’t recall that the commedians used a prompter, but never mind—and he occasionally got into disputes with the actors and others. It was an innocuous gag and just added to the general whirl of activity that included, but wasn’t limited to, the action on the platform.) Props are minimal—only what is actually used in the scene, no decorative elements beyond the painted drapes. “Decor” is painted onto the drapes, which looked to me to be modeled on 18th-century settings (Goldoni’s period) rather than 16th- or 17th-century (commedia’s period). The costumes, from what I could judge, are also early or mid-18th-century. Arlecchino, of course, wears his customary diamond-patterned patchwork outfit (an article on Soleri says he goes through three of them each show because of the sweat); all the comic male characters wear commedia masks, though only Arlecchino wears his all the time. (That’s, of course, why it was such a shock to see Soleri’s face at the curtain call.)

You may have noticed that I’ve focused on the physical aspects of the performance and haven’t said anything about the verbal comedy. That’s because that’s where the problem lay for me. It wasn’t the company’s fault, really—they spoke Italian, which I don’t understand, but that’s their language. The difficulty was in the supertitles and the auditorium configuration. I couldn’t read the titles from my seat without missing what was happening on stage entirely—it was physically impossible. There was only one title screen—up on the proscenium arch, right in the center. I was sitting fairly close to the stage, but over on house right. Alice Tully Hall is really a concert stage, and it has a wide stage with a very pronounced curve to it so that the house right and left seats are at about a 45° angle from the center of the stage. (Think of trying to watch a TV screen from the side.) Between the height above the stage and the angle of my view, reading the titles meant straining so much that I’d never get them read in time to look back at the stage to see what anyone was doing. So I decided to pay attention to the physical work, rely on the synopsis and my knowledge of the play and commedia to clue me in to what was going on, and ignore the actual dialogue. It wasn’t a completely satisfactory trade-off because I know that commedia includes a lot of jokes and other verbal play which I missed (assuming they would have even translated into English, which I supposed is problematical—though one review suggested that all the humor was replicated), and I wish that Lincoln Center, or whoever made this decision, had put screens at the sides and/or on the front of the stage (as several productions have done at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). I can understand why an interpreter wouldn’t have worked—the dialogue came too fast—but additional screens wouldn’t have been an imposition, especially since the performing area was confined to the center of the Alice Tully stage; the rest of the space was “off stage” and would not have been hampered by a screen placed at the outer edges of the proscenium.