Giorgio Strehler Directs Carlo Goldoni
By (author) Scott Malia
Publication date:
11 December 2013Length of book:
138 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739181911
Giorgio Strehler Directs Carlo Goldoni uses Giorgio Strehler’s Goldoni productions (and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni in particular) as a means to defining his directorial aesthetic. The book provides a framework for examining the director’s career that is expansive rather than restrictive, using Goldoni and Arlecchino servitore di due padroni as a through-line for Strehler’s fifty-year career at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano. This research defines Strehler’s multifaceted style and brings to light interrelationships among his various works, creating a base from which a variety of subsequent critical inquiries can be made. It also establishes Strehler’s identity within the larger scope of the Italian theatre as a whole. Finally, it creates the critical challenge of finding more expansive notions of directorial style and concept that unite diverse ideologies without delimiting our understanding of the director. Crucial to understanding Strehler’s work with Arlecchino servitore di due padroni is his consistent reinterpretation of the play, which received no less than five distinct productions during Strehler’s lengthy career. His repeated reworking of existing productions provides a baseline for examining what elements were maintained and what elements changed or evolved. The four key influences that defined Strehler’s aesthetic in his work with Arlecchino were commedia dell’Arte, Bertolt Brecht, “refractive theatricality” and Jacques Copeau. Through these productions, Strehler created a dialogue with his audience and helped change the reputation of Carlo Goldoni both in his own country and abroad.
Carlo Goldoni was the greatest Italian playwright of the 18th century. Giorgio Strehler was the greatest Italian director of the 20th century. Their ‘collaboration,’ when Strehler chose on several occasions to direct Goldoni’s comedy The Servant of Two Masters, produced exciting theatrical events. Scott Malia’s well-informed and insightful account of Strehler’s varying interpretations of the play not only provides detailed context for these legendary productions. It also opens out to larger questions of the reconstruction of a director’s work, its meaning to its original audiences, and the historical factors that govern artistic creation. Given the current popularity of One Man Two Guvnors, an updating of Goldoni's plays, Malia's study is remarkably timely.