2005 The Fairy Queen
Many people have said that our next play, The Fairy Queen, reminded them of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Our play, though a quite different story, is similar in three respects. Firstly, it uses four of Shakespeare’s characters, or rather characters which he borrowed from earlier plays and stories, Titania, Oberon, Theseus and Hippolyta, and plays out the love affairs referred to in the ‘Ill met by moonlight’ sequence. Secondly, it is a commedia dell’arte genre called boscareccia, which Shakespeare may have been aware of through Ovid’s Metamorphosis, but in any case fitted very nicely with his knowledge of English folklore. Thirdly, in The Fairy Queen we used verse extensively for the first time.
Boscareccia - The boscareccia are farces set in woodland and have mythical creatures as characters. In the commedia tradition they were often satyrs; in our tradition they are fairies. All our fairies - the pillywiggins, the boggarts, the ballybogs and the Gilly Doo, are or were once part of the mythology of British and Irish culture (as was of course Puck) and, although you may not have heard of them in this modern world, they were there once & their names still suggest our simpler past and happily live in the imagination of children. Primarily this is because we still yearn for a close and animistic association with nature. So our play, like 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', is a piece of boscareccia.
Its structure apart from the context of the woodland is identical to the ‘Italian household’ structure of traditional commedia dell’arte with Oberon now, not a powerful handsome hero, but a Pantalone-like mean, miserable and sexually inadequate vecchio and Titania a strong Signora, but in our case with an aching heart and sense of regret at a husband’s cruelty, which slightly departs from the tradition, but why shouldn’t we?
2006 The Gold Rush
Our next play again takes up Brecht’s idea of epic and we found that commedia dell’arte fits very nicely. It is another odyssey (therefore not a traditional commedia story structure), this time to find gold and with it happiness and personal meaning. Edmond Warner, a Daily Telegraph economics correspondent, described it as ‘a chilling reminder of the extraordinary lengths mankind will go to in the pursuit of wealth" (16/8/06), which, bearing in mind Brecht’s belief that epic should provoke thought in order to change society for the good, makes it seem Marxist and political, which troupes like the Gelosi or Confidenti would not have dreamed of being. However, Antonio Fava says that the principle subject matter of the commedia dell’arte is ‘the seven deadly sins’ and what the troupes did do was mercilessly ridicule the manners and mores of the powerful and rich in the fashion of carnival (coming precariously close sometime to biting the hand that fed them and even being thrown out of Italy for a time and at other times denied actual speech) - and the carnivale is essentially Marxist in that it seeks to turn social order upside down if only for the day.
But what The Gold Rush (nor for that matter commedia dell’arte) is not is Forum theatre, didactic or consciously political (with no position implied about the latter). Above all it is a human story - a tragedia in commedia terms, walking the edge between comedy and tragedy - using a ‘family structure’, this time on the move, with archetypal characters all of whom are close relatives of Pantalone, il Capitano, Signora, Arlecchino, Colombina, etc, etc. While the traditional scenarios may seem banal and non-provocative they don’t have to be in their application.
"As a writer-director Pete Talbot has proved in touring a different show each summer to hay fields, village greens, gardens and cricket pitches across the southern counties, commedia doesn't have to be obscure, or difficult, or set in 18thC Italy. The background to the current show is the Klondike gold rush of 1897 on the border of Alaska and Canada (the gold rush of the Chaplin film), and its eclectic dramatis personae include Irish and Italian immigrants, Native American prospectors, a sleaze-ridden mayor and his gun-crazed henchman, a lascivious hellfire preacher and a simpleton..... The company wears its historical credentials lightly. Unless primed, you might only dimly register commedia's distinctive physical disciplines at work, or the characters' correspondence to the archetypes of Pierrot, Harlequin and co.
But it's depth of study that gives this piece flavour and coherence, and makes it consistently captivating even when we spectators' backsides have grown numb from sitting on grass....Given a set that's no more than a painted booth, the players must draw a gaze using only their bodies. Often this involves movements to suggest phenomena such as howling wind, a log fire or the terrors of the so-called Golden Staircase - the mountain pass that claimed the lives of 70,000 poor and desperate hopefuls. Yet the profound anti-naturalism in the show is never arch. Every cast member, as well as taking several parts, generates sound effects and incidental music, and it soon seems perfectly natural to see characters take up accordion or violin....
Modern comedies are routinely described as dark. The Gold Rush shows that today's taste for laughter tempered by grim reality has its roots in commedia, or, strictly speaking, tragedia, its parallel form. Fosca (Death) is the sole stock character who appears here undisguised, lurking halfway up the Golden Staircase to claim his victims. There is no happy ending, yet 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." Jenny Gilbert: Independent on Sunday (16th July, 2006)
2007 Five Get Famous
When The San Francisco Mime Troupe began in 1959 they tried to find ‘stereotypical characters’ which would be effective in their particular social context and decided that the model offered by the commedia dell’arte could not be bettered. We would prefer to call them archetypes rather than stereotypes (See ‘Talk about Commedia’), but otherwise basically agree. There is a complication, however; the model is Italian which doesn’t always transfer as a whole unit. In America with a high concentration of Latin (Italian and Hispanic) immigrants an Italian social model is easily absorbed; it’s much harder in England.
When we decided to do a play about English village life and our class system (paradigmatically enshrined in Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ stories) the Italian ‘family household’ model with masters and servants was not entirely appropriate. But it was near enough and the treatment of character and the archetypes themselves worked perfectly - as it does in ‘Dad’s Army’, another paradigm of a certain period of English life given (probably unconsciously via the back door of music hall) a commedia dell’arte treatment.
Instead of the simple pyramid of Pantalone at the top with Signora, il Dottore, il Capitano and the Innamorati bringing in complications underneath and 1st and 2nd zanni, servetta and a range of other zanni providing a broad base, we have instead several separate but interacting groups each with their own hierarchies. There’s the village group lead by a Signora, Lady Lurcher (leader of the Shakespeare Society), with a distinct social scale beneath her of village characters, including a hopelessly incompetent 1st Zanni, PC Plucky. Within the children’s larger family, the Kirrins, there’s a part Pantalone / part il Dottore at the head, Uncle Quentin (changing tradition a little bit, but why not?), a Signora, Aunt Fanny, and a servetta, Bunty, the essential Innamorati, Bunny and Cicily, and interlopers in the form of il Capitano, Bertie Bounder, and a non-traditional character, Herr Schnich, created out of the immediate historical context of the story, of course (resembling a kind of nasty old Pantalone, but not quite).
Even among the Five we have a 1st zanni, Julian, and a number of mini-zanni and zagna as part of the group’s complex intrigues (including a mimed heroic dog). Of course, they have various levels of ‘poshness’ with Julian the most posh and Lionel the least which doesn’t fit the Italian class structure, but it doesn’t matter because the relationships still allow the lazzi and burli sequences possible among traditional zanni groups. But they are interacting now, not so much with their ‘betters’, but with an opposing adult world (which becomes the carnivalesque style butt of their offensive, even though as in the tradition they ultimately depend on them).
