The theatrical fairy tale by Carlo Gozzi (translated by N. Al. Toscani) knows, in the director's reading, an exquisite evocation of the vivante atmosphere of commedia dell'arte, a theatrical movement of great importance in the European performing arts. So, Tudor Lucanu opens a page in the history of Italian theater, absolutely relevant and representative of the period when Carlo Goldoni (the innovator) was dueling in ideas and convictions with Carlo Gozzi (the traditionalist). [...] Here come the artists, the acrobats, the clowns, the tricksters! Merriment has come to town. And the artists put on their masks and get to work. Just like old times. [...] Movement and acrobatics, tumbling, falling and rising, they put the actors to the test. The costumes by Zsófia Gábor were quite remarkable. Not in garish, carnivalesque colors, as commedia dell'arte actors are usually dressed, but in uniform beige, in cloths embellished with fancy appliqués and cut-outs from old illustrations of clowns and comedians. From this point of view, Tudor Lucanu's staging both respects the time period and rediscovers it.

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The dialogues have a clownish rhythm, the actors' gestures are reminiscent of puppets. It seems to me a great performance of the actors to switch to this interpretative "mechanism". Matei Rotaru, Cosmin Stănilă, Cecilia Lucanu-Donat, Cecilia Lucanu-Donat, Cătălin Codreanu, Miron Maxim, Romina Merei, Ruslan Bârlea, Radu Lărgeanu, Adriana Băilescu perform impeccably. They all seem to be metamorphosing with great versatility. I would particularly mention Miron Maxim, in a massive, often Shakespearean character. He simply plays a role here that propels him to great artistic heights. The performance validates the value of the Cluj National Theatre. A curative premiere, with classic, clear catharsis, so necessary in a century of uncertainty.

 

 

CARLO GOZZI (1720 - 1806)

Carlo Gozzi (Source: Wikipedia)

 

 

A fascinating personality of his time, Carlo Gozzi had a contradictory and unexpected literary destiny. Although he enjoyed success during his lifetime, his place in the history of world literature is more likely to be secured by those he influenced posthumously, his plays themselves being rarely performed. He was always a defender of tradition in literature and an avowed conservative, but posterity remembers him as an inspiration to the German Romantics and even, centuries later, to avant-garde artists. Gifted with a relentlessly polemical spirit, he triumphed against the reformer Carlo Goldoni, so much so that Goldoni, disappointed by contemporary public taste, went into exile, but Gozzi remained in the shadow of his rival for a long time.

Born in Venice in 1720, he was physically and spiritually linked, until his death, to the Republic of La Serenissima and, above all, to its cultural and artistic life. He came from a lineage of empoverished nobility, so he spent his youth caught between the hubris of family respectability and a burdensome financial reality. He received a thorough humanist education early on, although the steady decline in his parents' wealth prevented him from completing his studies. Like his older brother, Gasparo, he cultivated a passion for literature and, in particular, for the great writers of the Italian pantheon, almost fanatically promoting the so-called "purified Italian", a literary version of the language that purists of Gozzi's type wanted to preserve in a form already shaped by their illustrious predecessors.

Forced by an accelerating deterioration in his parents' material situation, which he blamed on "expenses disproportionate to income", on the many "offspring" and "passive litigation"[1], the young man of letters flirted for several years with a military career, which did not suit him at all. After a three-year stint in Dalmatia, he returned to Venice, to a home increasingly plagued by poverty, tensions and, after the death of his father, in intra-family conflicts. Eventually, family disagreements reached ridiculous proportions, culminating in Gasparo satirizing his brothers in a raunchy scene inserted in the comedy Aesop in the City, which he performed on stage at his quasi-bankrupt theater.

 

 

Under the pressure of such personal troubles and increasing financial hardship, Carlo Gozzi fell ill with tuberculosis and found himself on the brink of death. However, he overcame his illness and, after this dramatic episode, he devoted himself even more fervently to his passion for literature. At the same time, his vocation as a polemicist found its fulfillment in a cultural climate dominated by the clash of ideas between conservatives and progressives. During his long convalescence, his friends would visit him to amuse themselves with his "burlesque, moderately satirical sonnets"[2], which he composed against authors who were followers of literary innovation, such as Pietro Chiari and Carlo Goldoni. To the latter, and others like them, he reproached the corruption of the Italian language, the disavowal of the model of their predecessors, and the perversion of the young, whom he would have led astray from "the path of true cultured poetry and from precious simplicity, encouraging them to strike at everything that in past centuries had been venerated."[3]

In the 1740s, moved by the spirit of this combative classicism, Gozzi and his companions, among whom was Gasparo, more in jest than in earnest, laid the foundations of a society of merry but rigidly conservative literati called the Accademia dei Granelleschi. From this moment on, the literary activity of Carlo Gozzi, who had received the academic name "The Solitary"[4], became more organized, his ambition focused on defending the Commedia dell'Arte against the realist "deviations" of playwrights like Goldoni.

 

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Carlo Goldoni and Pietro Chiari (Source: Wikipedia)

 

In the mid-18th century, Venice was a melting pot of artistic energies, a veritable outlet for new and even exotic literary creations, more or less successful. In this context, Goldoni and Abbot Chiari enjoyed an increasingly effervescent popularity and were among the most prolific playwrights on the Venetian stage. Gozzi, however, considered them "two geniuses of the uncultured"[5] and the embodiment of the decadent spirit that polluted the society of the time. Therefore, wishing to amuse his fellow academics, he composed a satirical pamphlet entitled The Lunette of Influences for the leap year, in which he denounced in his comic style the linguistic abuses of contemporary authors. The pamphlet, originally circulated in manuscript only in the circles of friends of the Academy, was printed by a coincidence of circumstances and ended up in the hands of Goldoni, who saw fit to respond with a diatribe of his own. This triggered a series of high-profile public confrontations, culminating in Gozzi's decision to deal the final blow to his rivals, while at the same time exercising his own literary talent.

This gave birth to his first theatrical fairy tale, The Love for Three Oranges, with which he set out to demonstrate that public taste was no guarantee of quality and that he himself could achieve greater success than fashionable authors with a simple story that grandmothers tell their grandchildren. So he entrusted the script to Sacchi's troupe of actors, who would, over the years, stage his other fairy tales. But the success of the show far exceeded Gozzi's initial ambitions and the expectations of his opponents, whose popularity was pulverized by this curious triumph. By using the typologies and devices of the Commedia to introduce allegorical motifs, parodic nuances and moralizing conclusions, the author succeeded in establishing a genre that was thematically and theatrically unexpectedly fruitful and immediately won over the Venetian public. His subsequent plays were even more enthusiastically applauded, prompting him to continue his collaboration with Sacchi's actors, who were also beneficiaries of the revival of interest in the Commedia. In all, Gozzi wrote ten such theatrical fairy tales, including The Raven, The Stag King, Turandot and The Lucky Horses, drawing his inspiration from European and Eastern folklore.

 

 

Over the next few years, the playwright became a constant presence on the Venetian theatrical scene, the scale of his success exposing him to the terrible gossip typical of this picturesque world. His friendship with the actress Teodora Ricci, to whom he became a sort of protector, often unwillingly, and the subsequent deterioration of this relationship led to a scandal in which he antagonized the politician Pier Antonio Gratarol, the artist's lover. According to Gozzi's memoirs (which he wrote precisely to shed light on this complicated affair), the woman had convinced her husband and, besides him, the whole of Venice that her former patron had violently satirized him in the comedy Remedies of Love. Although Gozzi had no such intention, Sacchi, satisfied with the much-anticipated uproar, cast an actor who looked exactly like Gratarol in the suspect role, thus turning gossip into a certainty. The author found himself in the middle of a situation that got out of control. Although the public mockery to which the politician was subjected had its source rather in the antipathy of his fellow citizens and members of the Senate, he blamed his entire decline on the infamous play, Gozzi becoming, in the collective mind, responsible for the flight from the Republic of his enemy.

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Although Gozzi owed his fame to his charming theatrical fairy tales, he spent much of his career trying unsuccessfully to reinvent himself, convinced that the fairy tales that had taken the Venetian stage by storm had exhausted their dramatic potential. He wrote numerous tragicomedies and adaptations of Spanish plays, but he never again met with the unequivocal enthusiasm of his audiences. After his death in 1806, his writings were long neglected in his native lands. However, his fame spread throughout Europe thanks to the enthusiasm his fairy tales aroused in other authors. Turandot, for example, has seen numerous rewritings and translations, with Schiller's version inspiring Puccini's famous opera. Gozzi's fairy tales have also inspired artistic reformers such as Meyerhold and Vahtangov.

Today, Goldoni has been fully rehabilitated, but Gozzi's spectre still lingers in the canon of world literature. It is hard to believe, however, that the latter could have anticipated, during his life full of such irony, that his name would eventually be associated with productions that innovated the universal theater.

[1] Carlo Gozzi, Unnecessary Memories, Editura Univers, Bucharest, 1987, p. 27
[2] Idem, p. 112
[3] Idem, p. 113
[4] Idem, p. 117
[5] Idem, p. 123

 

The Stag King, the third theatrical fairy tale by the Venetian author Carlo Gozzi, was written and first staged in the second half of the 18th century, after the huge success of The Love for Three Oranges and The Raven. Like the playwright's other works, this one was staged by the troupe of Sacchi, an actor who became famous throughout Venice for his portrayal of the Commedia Truffaldino. With much less of a satirical component compared to his previous writing, The Stag King uses Commedia dell'Arte devices and allegorical motifs from childhood stories to recalibrate traditional values. Gozzi himself confessed, in his autobiography Unnecessary Memories, that the text aroused great enthusiasm among the audience, who intuited in it values he had not initially thought of, and hailed it as "an allegorical moral mirror". [1] The author's adversaries, aroused by its success, tried to justify the new triumph by the appeal of the fantastical aspects of the text, prompting Gozzi to reduce these elements in his next theatrical fairy tales, Turandot and The Lucky Horses.

The enchanting story of King Deramo, transformed into a stag after the treacherous minister Tartaglia tricks him into revealing a magical secret by which souls can change their bodies, was adapted for film in 1969 by Soviet director Pavel Arsenov.

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[1] Carlo Gozzi, Unnecessary Memories, Editura Univers, 1987, Bucharest, p. 14

 

Interview with Tudor Lucanu, director of Carlo Gozzi's The King Stag

Emma Pedestru: How and why did you choose this text?
Tudor Lucanu: I was attracted by the idea of theater that tells a story, and The King Stag is a story, a theatrical fairy tale. That was the first thought. Apparently, this story has no acute connection with the immediate reality of today, or with the social themes assiduously debated by the new theater creators who are in fashion today, but it is a theatrical fairy tale that, using codified theatrical means, can reach the audience and can awaken in them an emotion, a lesson or, perhaps, just good humor. It is a theatrical fairy tale, a story in which there is a very interesting combination of worlds. On the one hand there is the Venetian world, the world of Commedia dell'Arte, and on the other hand there is the Eastern world, because the play is set in the land of Serendippo, Serendip being the Persian name for Sri Lanka. It's also interesting to see the proximity between the Italian theatre of the 16th-17th centuries, and revitalized by Gozzi in the 18th century, and the Kolam theatre, a type of Singhalese folk theatre, a mask theatre with very clear and recognizable characters. I found this interweaving of the two worlds and the two types of theater very beautiful. Gozzi, by bringing the Commedia dell'Arte characters into this oriental area, provided another layer to explore and exploit. Another reason I chose The King Stag would be that it is a fairy tale about imposture - a theme that interests me. With this show I want to open a discussion about the imposture of someone who, with far too much ambition, tries to become what he will never be. Of course, imposture is to be found, if we make an analogy with today, almost everywhere, in all fields (in politics, in academia or even in culture), but I didn't want a show that points the finger.

E.P.: Being, as you said, a theatrical fairy tale, a story, what kind of audience is the show aimed at?
T.L.: I think we can talk about a show with a general audience. Children can enjoy it, but it's also for adults. We really went with that in mind, to make a show for the whole family.

 

E.P.: Speaking of that initial thought, what do you think today's young theater-goer expects from the theater? What attracts this audience to the theater?
T.L.: I don't think we need to go in the direction of a theater that is focused on attracting audiences. This path could be a trap for theater performance, because it would make us fall into superficiality. I think we can make shows that are of value, that have a message, that convey an idea, and, most importantly, create emotion. I think that's what's so often missing: genuine emotion and conveying it in such a way that the audience doesn't go home the way they came to the theater. Seeing a show should not be like going to the market. Theater is different, it is movement. The theatrical act has to change something in the spectator. If it doesn't, then it is useless. I feel that's the value of a performance. What attracts the young audience? I don't know, maybe this need for emotion. We're always in front of gadgets in which we pour our lives, but it's not something real, tangible. Even identity on a social network is constructed, artificial. It's not you, it's just a part of you, a mask. The point is that that's what theater does: it shows the masks, but it also shows the unmasking and tries to move something in the spectator. Maybe that's what young people are looking for. If you're between gadgets and technology all day, you need something alive in your life. And theater is alive.

E.P.: Coming back to Gozzi, you were referring earlier to his attempt to revitalize Commedia dell'Arte...
T.L.: Yes, in fact that's where his dispute with Goldoni and Chiari started. Gozzi was against theater reform. He came from an aristocratic family and had a more conservative outlook on life and art. From that point of view, if I analyze myself a little, I'm in a more conservative area myself. I don't go out on the street and pick a subject to bring into the theater and just talk about it. I think the major themes are also found in the past. Even Romanian fairy tales, for example, are told and re-told and they change form from one century to the next. Evolution is welcome and I agree with it, but the big themes remain, they still exist. And I think we can hold on to them, we can rediscover them, not necessarily to preserve them, not necessarily to make a museum, but because that's what makes us human in the end, the fact that we remain the same in some ways. We have the same ambitions, the same problems, so why not talk about them using the texts from then?

 

E.P.: So what do you think is the charm of Commedia dell'Arte today?
T.L.: I don't know, because what has come down to us today is not the same Commedia dell'Arte as it was then. We've read about it, some of us studied it at university, but in fact we use certain principles of theater construction that come from that area. So I don't think what I did is a Commedia dell'Arte performance, but I used certain elements, like the mask. But this is not only Commedia dell'Arte either. Besides the Kolam theater, there are other forms of performance in Sri Lanka that use masks, which we drew inspiration from. But the mask, however, imposes a certain kind of speech, a certain kind of construction of the role. We have also taken the structure of comedy, which has a certain mathematics, from which very interesting scenes can emerge, but it is not pure Commedia dell'Arte.

E.P.: But it's not necessarily pure with Gozzi either.
T.L.: Yes, because he gave different values to certain characters. But the Masks still retained their character, which is not the case with us to the same extent. If, in Gozzi's play, Tartaglia kept his stammer, we gave it up, because I didn't find it absolutely necessary. Pantalone, too, had certain characteristics. But he, too... he could be stingy, miserly, or he could be a powerless old man. Or an old man who plays his impotence. So you can still juggle certain characteristics of the mask. And every mask must have a counter-mask. For example, there has to be a moment when the impotent old man is happy and starts jumping on the walls or dancing, and then he goes back to his original state. There's always this contrast of the mask. In Commedia dell'Arte, the Lovers didn't wear masks. In our show, everyone wears them, and this is partly because the text requires it, but also because in our show the mask has gradually become a symbol of the character. That is why the death of a character on stage is translated in our play by the removal of the mask. The moment the mask is taken off, it is dead, it is no longer alive, which is an important sign that we work with in the show.

 

E.P.: Speaking of the pure forms of this type of theater, what role does improvisation play in your show?
T.L.: Gozzi also has scenes in which there is only the canvass, in which only the story is told. So, he also gave the actor free rein, he gave them the freedom to do his act, to improvise, to do those lazzies, to bring out the best of his talent to attract the audience. We used that. We gave freedom to Matei, who plays Truffaldino, and those who are on stage with him (Adriana, Radu and Ruslan), to improvise the text, to write it. There's another thing about Commedia dell'Arte, the type of character construction: each character, each Mask, came with the individual talent of the actor. If you had an actor who was good at juggling, then at some point he juggled; if he was good at speech, he imprinted that on the character; if he was good at music, the character had a musical moment. So we gave the actors the opportunity to improvise, to play with elements that they mastered very well. So we played with their creative possibilities and brought them out. A lot of things come from the actors, from what they can do, and they can become moments of acting virtuosity.

E.P.: How have the actors adapted to playing with masks?
T.L.: Quite easily, because the vast majority of them studied masks in college. That was also one of the reasons why I chose to direct the play with masks. I knew that they already knew about this kind of work and that we weren't going to start from scratch, because then we would have needed at least another two months of rehearsals just to study the masks. But they already had this knowledge and they just applied it, so it wasn't very, very complicated. And I think that's actually one of the advantages Cluj has, because the actors who study here do a whole semester of just mask study, which I think is important for them. The student actor must understand the difference between themselves and the role they are playing. And the mask helps you make that difference.

 

E.P.: You were talking earlier about the merging of two theatrical cultures and traditions in the performance. But these worlds are rather colourful, at least in our imagination, whereas you have opted for a rather simple, uncluttered style. How did you arrive at this aesthetic formula?
T.L.: It looks simple, but it's full of details. For example, the costumes look simple, but if you look carefully, they're not simple at all. They are made of the same materials, in the same color zone, but there are details that individualize each character very well. And Zsófi (Zsófia Gábor, n.n.) has worked on these elements very carefully. Of course, they are not colored like a rainbow, but the details of the tailoring, the way a sleeve or a pleat are made, give a certain visual rhythmicity. And the set seems very simple - a moving scene, which packs and unpacks itself, creating certain spaces. But it's actually very dynamic, even though it looks simple. Through the transformations that happen on the stage, it takes on this dynamism, this diverse rhythm of the scenes. And the Singhalese world is a motley, colourful world. But we have tried to bring things into a more essentialized zone. In fact, the mask also essentializes the character, because it reflects a certain trait, the dominant one. All this was reflected in the set and the costumes. Colour comes from something else. I think there's a tendency these days to put a lot of color to attract, but this baroque of means doesn't always help the theatrical act.

E.P.: I also perceived in the performance a reference to the ritual dimension of theater. How did you think about this aspect?
T.L.: The story itself includes elements of magic, magic spells, the supernatural, so it has this ritualistic dimension. And in Sri Lanka there are certain traditional dances and mask games from that area. For example, they have the 18 Sanni, with 18 masks, each representing a disease, in a dance of exorcism. So there are things that can resemble what we do in the show. I don't want to sell the ending, but we have the bird mask there, which is also a reference to Sinhala theater, but more in the area of Raksha masks, which are demon masks. So there are a lot of details that inspired us. And the sound part is made with some traditional Sri Lankan instruments, there are some specific Sri Lankan sounds that fit very well with what we have built on stage. So this sound element, the atmospheric element, is a combination of Singhalese instruments and the sounds produced by the actors. We also played with the idea of theater within theater. There is always the difference between the actor who is outside the play, who helps to create the performance, and the actor on stage, who wears the mask. And the mask comes to life.