What is Commedia dell'Arte?
A good place to start is with some of the confusions we came across during the tour of our first new play, 'The Comedy of Babi Babbett' (2002). We had feedback saying that people had thought - Therefore had decided not to come - that the performance would be in Italian, that it would be 'highbrow and intellectual, therefore obscure', that it was a puppet show, that it was for children, or that it was some sort of circus performance. In fact there are a few grains of truth in all of these things, but what sort of excuse is 'a few grains of truth' for not coming and having a good time?
It is true that Babi's ancestors are Italian (and French), Mr Punch is his cousin (and Harlequin his father), children and adults have come to adore him over the years (as with Charlie Chaplin's little tramp) and, of course, whole troupes of his uncles, aunts and second cousins have knocked each other about in circuses. What we do is not, however, about ancestors, but is contemporary theatre, is intended to make people laugh (mainly, but also cry sometimes), is intended for adults (some as young as three), generally doesn't use puppets, and has as much slapstick as any circus act. In fact we literally use the battoccio, or slapstick, to create illusions. And it is in English (mainly).
For those of you who think that commedia dell'arte is masked drama, only some of it was and we use (mainly) the bit of the tradition that wasn't, so we use white faced Pierrot style make-up and brightly coloured costumes and what we call 'wig-hats' like in cartoons. (Look at the photos on this site.) In fact 'cartoon-isation' is a very important part of our style - that is, taking the essential features of everything and making them big and obvious. That's what we do.
Brief history of the commedia dell'arte
The first commedia dell'arte troupes can be traced to Italy in the 1530's. Well known things about them include: They were the first troupes of professional actors in Europe. They performed outdoors at first, but as they got commissions (like all sensible actors who need money to survive) they performed indoors as well in rich people's houses and theatres.
Then when politicians and priests couldn't get the jokes they crossed into France and eventually spread throughout Europe looking for people who would pay them to do what they did best, make people laugh. Two other important things: Some of them in every troupe wore leather masks - and they didn't use written scripts; they improvised. There are two red herrings here, however, which have got most physical theatre actors I've come across sniffing ecstatically like dazed Tom cats. They are: that to do commedia dell'arte today you have to (1) wear leather masks and (2) improvise. Not true. I'll come back to those contentious little points.
Just leather masks?
First of all, only some of the them wore leather masks. The Lovers (or inammorati ) never did. Nor did Pedrolino (who eventually became Pierrot and the 'white-faced clown' of circus). Nor did Scapino, Peppe-Nappa (our logo image), Mezzetin, the Signora, Tartaglia (except large spectacles), and the unmasked version of Il Capitano called Il Cavaliere, among others. The zannis (servants), among them famously Arlechinno (Harlequin), Brighella, Fritellino, and Pulcinella (who became Mr Punch), and the old men (or vecchi ) such as Pantalone (Pantaloon) and Il Dottore (the Doctor), of course, all did, although as commedia dell'arte actors specialised in particular characters and have brought their own whims and foibles to them there are many cases where even these characters didn't wear masks - for example, the great Martinelli probably played Arlechinno without a mask as Dario Fo has often done in modern times.
What happened historically, in fact, was that as time went on and the influence of commedia dell'arte spread across Europe the masks were used less and less until they almost became extinct. But the white faces and other stylised forms of make-up were continued and developed by modified commedia dell'arte , such as the Night Scenes, harlequinades, pantomime, music hall, ballet, the many specialist clowns of circus, Vaudeville (with the flood of Italian exiles to America and the influence of English music hall entertainers like Fred Karno, Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin), and eventually silent movies. And, of course, through the silent movies there came an inestimable degree of influence on popular comic actors down to the present day.
Why did the leather masks almost disappear?
We, as passionate advocates of commedia dell'arte today, must remember two things from this potted history: Why did the masks almost disappear? And what was even more important than the masks in this history? The masks disappeared because they were rooted in a Mediterranean tradition of masked performance going back thousands of years through Italian Atellan farce, Phlyax comedy, Ancient Greek comedy to primitive religion and magic and the further away from the Mediterranean performers went the less and less the masks' meanings could be understood.
Instead there came into play the very simple fact that if you cover up the face, which after all in most human interaction expresses probably 80% of our communication, with a mask which doesn't have roots in your culture the performance won't speak to you. So, sensibly, the masks were discarded and the more accessible white faces and other stylised make-up's, which did the job of universalising the face's meanings just as well as the masks did, but without losing the nuances of the face and the possibilities of subtle contact, became more popular.
The Talking Body
But one thing was never lost in this history and is the truly important thing about commedia dell'arte. If you cover up the face then the responsibility for conveying meaning is distributed to the whole body. So from the very beginning commedia dell'arte actors always had a complex vocabulary of body language, what Antonio Fava says was 'composed of clear and highly-expressive gestural character'. This was further reinforced by two things: Working outdoors body language needed (as it still does) to consist of bold gestures to communicate across space and in the face of background noise - and as troupes crossed language boundaries or turned to their advantage the plethora of Italian regional dialects the body was made to express what spoken vocabulary could not.
The movements needn't be big; often small but pointedly 'gestured' movements of the feet and hands were (and are) powerful expressions of meaning - and in commedia dell'arte the language of movement is as complex and subtle as spoken language.
While the masks, which added deep layers of meaning for the original Mediterranean audiences who could understand them, disappeared, the vocabulary of body language has remained the most expressive part of the tradition.
A cursory look at Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, countless music hall performers such as Max Wall, Norman Wisdom, and even Lee Evans and Rowan Atkinson today shows commedia dell'arte's future inheritance, unwitting though it may be on the part of these performers.
John Cleese was not the first actor to realise that legs are funny. Nor Lee Evans. Nor for that matter Jacques Tati & Max Wall. Music Hall kept ‘whole body acting’ alive in the face of Naturalism and held the door open back to the commedia dell’arte. Of course all good acting is ‘whole body’; the difference is in the distribution of weight. Commedia distributes it evenly through the body; naturalism is dominated by the face. The mask tradition makes a point of covering up the natural face and replaces it with an abstriction, the fundamental principle of archetypal character creation. Bad naturalism is just neck up & therefore dead acting.
Improvisation in the commedia dell’arte
But surely improvisation is the most important defining feature of commedia dell'arte (after the masks) devotees of Physical Theatre will say. Certainly 'improvisation' - in inverted commas because it needs to be understood and defined - was an essential ingredient, but there are problems with this that contemporary exponents of the commedia dell'arte like ourselves have to address.
The first thing that has to be understood is that 'improvisation' did not mean just making it up as they went along. To begin with they used a scenario or list of all the key 'things' they were going to do (or platt as they were called in Elizabethan theatre). Well, that's easy enough; we'll have one of those says the modern improviser. They also had commonplace books in which set speeches were written down and learnt by heart (although probably also re-written while on their feet). So it wasn't completely improvised.
