Taking theatre into villages
We began touring our commedia dell’arte inspired shows to village greens, pub gardens, private gardens, recreation grounds and even cow fields in the summer of 1999. Summer 2008 will be our tenth outdoor tour and our eleventh project in total including our short indoor season with ‘The Wife’ at The Old Red Lion in 2004. Just under 8,000 people saw ‘Five Get Famous’ our 2007 play, our highest number so far despite it being the wettest summer literally in recorded history. We tour mainly to villages, but also to some towns and a few heritage sites, from Falmouth to Canterbury. The furthest north we go is Hampton Court Palace, although in 2008 we will be performing on a green in the heart of London (Newington Green, Islington) for the first time. We began with three Shakespeare’s (The Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona and Twelfth Night), all with traditional commedia dell’arte scenarios (twins, mix-up’s, overbearing fathers, etc) to start building a fan base.
New writing
In 2002 we created our first brand new play, ‘The Comedy of Babi Babbett’. There have been five more since, sometimes totally new stories (‘The Gold Rush’), sometimes just hanging onto the flimsy thread of an existing story (‘The Wife of Bath’, ‘The Odyssey’, ‘The Fairy Queen’ and ‘Five Get Famous’), but always with new characters and scenarios. It is true we have gradually moved away from the traditional scenarios typified by the Scenarios of Flaminia Scala, but until ‘Five Get Famous’ we have always stuck closely to the Italian family structure with the debauched and mean Pantalone type at the head, the seedy and seductive Signora, the pairs of Innamorati (the Lovers) with their traditional battute (or batting) dialogue, the boastful but cowardly il Capitano, the various Il Dottores or doctors and of course the zanni or clowns.
In ‘Five Get Famous’ we abandoned the Italian model for the first time and used a traditional English class structure, but still as always all our characters (with a few exceptions) were brothers, sisters or cousins of the commedia dell’arte ‘family’. Our new play, Noah Babel’s Ark, goes back to the Italian model, despite having nothing Italian about it at all, being set in London in 1922 and being about a Jewish family, but remains a powerful new and contemporary story, such is the flexibility of the commedia dell’arte and its almost universal archetypes.
Our style adheres very closely to traditional commedia movement, with visual or ‘stand alone’ gags (lazzi) and sequences (burli), a key feature of which is the battoccio or slapstick. Live music is integrated as in the tradition with the team playing up to ten instruments live between them. For reasons you can read about in our ‘Talk Archives’, we use the white face (pantomime blanche) typical of characters like the Lovers and Pedrolino or Pierrot for all characters rather than leather masks. One exception is the almost ever present Fosca, a Death figure (‘gloom’ in Italian) who plays without mask until he comes for his victims. Then he puts it on. Reference to him leads us really to the key themes of all our work: triumph over adversity and the heroism of the human spirit. As Jenny Gilbert (Independent on Sunday) said in her review of ‘The Gold Rush’: "The triumph of this vibrant production is the lingering conviction that love, friendship, the stream of life and the human spirit all give Fosca a run for his money" - themes embodied in our logo, Peppe-Nappa, who despite being at the bottom of the pile, with his hand-me-down clothes too big for him & constantly put upon, still manages to dance on his adversity.
1999 The Comedy of Errors
Our first tour was in the lovely summer of 1999 with the commedia dell’arte inspired play of twins, mix-up’s and confusions, Shakespeare’s appropriately named under the circumstances ‘Comedy of Errors’. We had a cast of nine, hopelessly low wages and a set that initially took four hours to put up until Pete Talbot stayed up most of the night after about the third show and rebuilt it! We performed 37 times across mainly East and West Sussex with a short tour to Dorset. We made a huge loss but at least we had begun.
2000 Two Gentlemen of Verona
We went for another Shakespeare in 2000 in order to continue building a fan base. Again, although it doesn’t have an obvious association with the scenarios of the commedia dell’arte, with its pairs of lovers, or innamorati as we would call them, it could easily be interpreted in the style. It was always our intention to eventually make our own commedia plays but we needed time to learn, develop our style and build our audience. Although we didn’t go back to Dorset (that would have to wait) we began to visit Hampshire with our first show in Selborne and also in the other direction to Kent. It was quite successful financially. We were beginning to grow. People were asking us back. We were building strong relationships with communities. Many of them have remained close friends to this day.
2001 Twelfth Night
Our third and final Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, came in 2001. Again it was a plot he had taken from Plautus, a primary source of many commedia scenarios. It was back to cross dressing, mistaken identity, confusion and identical twins, the raw material of the tradition. Of course Shakespeare turned it into a masterpiece - and it was perfect for our final ‘classic’ before launching off on our own. It was very successful and we formed a core fan base that has stayed with us. It was never our purpose to merely regurgitate old plays. We wanted to make our own characters and say the things we wanted to say. But these three plays provided the foundations. We have often been asked to do a Shakespeare again, but it’s not what we now do.
2002 The Comedy of Babi Babbett
Written by Pete Talbot fresh back from training with Antonio Fava at the Scuola Internazionale dell’Attore Comico and using ideas from Flaminia Scala’s ‘Scenarios of the Commedia dell’Arte’, this was our first brand new play. The play uses a proto-text with passages marked for allimprovviso (See Talk.) to give the actors freedom to improvise within a strong textual structure. We made the decision not to improvise from a scenario as happened in the tradition because we feel that even the best improvisors today cannot match the richness of text possible in an essentially oral culture where actors were used to carrying great quantities of raw materials in their heads for play-making on their feet. Ours was we felt the nearest way to getting the feel of traditional commedia dell’arte with the freshness of spontaneity and a strong underlying textual and archetectonic structure. We also opted to use white face instead of masks. (See Talk Archive.) In the end there was too much material so it was too long, but it was a bold and successful experiment
The Story - The miserly Sydney Lean has unexpectedly received an apparent gift of succulent pork sausages - part of the remains of the recently slaughtered Bessie - from the voluptuous & disloyal wife of his card school companion Dr Taureaumerde. He takes this to be a sign of her secret affection for him, so goes about seducing her despite his servant Babi's 'help'. Babi meanwhile is in love with Lisetta, but she would prefer to marry a soldier. All roads lead ultimately to The Golden Cockerel Chocolate House where discoveries are made and revenge is wreaked.
2003 & 4 The Wife of Bath
The Wife of Bath was the first of two experiments in applying the tools of commedia to what Brecht called ‘epic’ theatre (as of course Brecht did himself in his cabaret style). We set aside the traditional scenario of an Italian type of family or household within which servants and masters, lovers and interlopers, compete for advantage, servants mess things up, because of stupidity or deliberately to get one over their ‘superiors’, and the world is turned upside down in the manner of the carnivale. Some people might say: If it’s not this then it’s not commedia dell’arte. Well maybe it isn’t, but we are not concerned to excavate someone else’s scenario from another country and another time, but to find new uses for their theatrical devices and tools for our own purposes.
Our version of The Wife of Bath was an ‘epic’ in four respects. It was episodic in structure, anti-heroic, it relied on the strong narrative voice of a storyteller (Alison) and was intended to provoke thought (in our case about what women really want from men). We recreated Chaucer’s character group (Alison, Madam Eglantine, the prioress, Harry Bailey, the host, Sir Calidore, the Knight, Friar Hubert, and Robin, the miller) as archetypal commedia characters to provide a forum for debate. The tradition, of course, never ‘debated’, but our question was: Can archetypes debate? We found they could. Alison’s story in Chaucer’s poem is mainly about her own life and therefore a kind of explanation of what type of archetype she was, a certain kind of strong woman who is on top in bed (and everywhere else). We dealt with this fast and like Brecht in a kind of cabaret format - and in the final song, Red Stockings.
The Tale - Her actual tale is given only about a dozen lines by Chaucer, which gave us carte blanche to create totally new characters (a servetta, Eloise, master and servant, Roland and Dogwood, the dark il dottore, Dr Goulot, the zanni, Fleabane, the enigmatic Woman by the Lake, the mysterious Fosca type, the ferryman, etc) and situations each of which was a separate canovaccio, episode or mini-commedia scenario. With The Wife of Bath we found our feet and our style - whole body acting, archetypal characters, storytelling, slapstick (using lazzi and burli - See Talk Archive) and cabaret.
2004 The Odyssey
Our next play, The Odyssey, worked in the same way. It was another Brechtian style epic (with the goddess Athene as narrator) & another journey or rite of passage (this time for the son Telemachus and wife Penelope, who search for the lost father / son, Odysseus, behind the myth and hero), but dealt with as it should in epic anti-heroically. The issues are not debated as such, not in the way they were in The Wife, but presented to us through Athene’s storytelling. This seems like a long way from the commedia dell’arte and in many respects it is, yet the characters are archetypes and the traditional relationships between servants and masters, classes and types, the whole body acting, the animal referencing in creating characters and the cabaret style integration of music are all tools of commedia.
While we ‘found ourselves’ with The Wife we now began adding other devices, such as the use of verse as well as prose by the narrator, stepping outside the play so that actors can comment on the action as themselves, or within the play characters are given the chance to play other characters to help understand each other. So Athene stops the action and makes Telemachus play his own father at an earlier point in history to help him understand him. Like commedia this allows the exploration of the surreal or naturalistically impossible. We also developed much more fully something we began in The Wife, what we call ‘knots’, when actors create illusions of objects, for example, ships, by moving as if tied together by invisible threads (something closely related to what is called in the tradition macchina).
The Use of Commedia - Can we work without the traditional Italian family or household structure? Perfectly well. Do we need the leather masks? Better not in England - unless it’s just an archaeological exercise. Is there a better model for creating archetypal characters than the commedia dell’arte? Probably not. Is there a better technique for whole body acting? Probably not. Is there a greater sphere of reference for physical comedy? Absolutely not.
