Commedia dell'Arte [antikvár]

Introduction The actor may get bored with perfecting his craft in order to perform in outdated plays; soon he will want not only to act but to compose for himself as well. Then at last we shall see the rebirth of the theatre of improvisation.' meyerhold The purpose of this book is to help give commedia dell'arte back to the actor in the hope that it may again provide one of the base languages of a theatrical lingua franca. It is also founded on a personal conviction that if there is to be a regeneration of the theatrical medium in the next century, it must come via the re-empowering of the performer rather than the continued hegemony of playwright and director. In saying that, I am minded that the etymology of the word Esperanto, designed in 1887, derives from the Latin verb for to hope. Commedia, however, is an actual language, dispersed and fallen into disrepair, rather than an artificial one with a majority purpose and a minority uptake. Throughout the twentieth century the question has been (and still remains despite the efforts of Craig, Meyerhold, Copeau, Reinhardt and later directors) how to retrieve information from scholarship in such a way that actors' efforts at self-authored Commedia improvisation are not merely illustrative of what the original form may have been like. Craig was first to the heart of the problem: History, to creative minds, is often a dry dead thing. It is the story of the past. Creators are concerned with the Present and the Future. It concerns our old friends Harlequin, Pantaloon, Pulcinella or Punch and their companions the Doctor, Brighella, Scaramuccia, Coviello and the Captain. What fun, you think. Yes, what fun but what genius also, for the inventors of these figures were men of genius. Whether the inventors were t