To commemorate the 300th anniversary of Carlo Goldoni’s birth, Maleth will be presenting one of his most famous works Il Servitore di Due Padroni
About the production
The play will be an adaptation in Maltese of Il Servitore di Due Padroni and will be presented in the Manoel Theatre between 9 - 11 November. The direction is in the able hands of Jaume Villalba Sanchez, who specialises in Commedia dell’arte, besides other forms of theatre. The Maltese title of the play is Il-Qaddej ta’ Zewg Bosses. Maleth will be presenting this comedy with a strong dose of commedia dell’arte complete with masks, costumes and movements. This adaptation includes also some references to the Maltese scenario. Taking part in the play will be Narcy Calamatta, Joe Cortis, Nikki Farrugia, Anna Bassily, Andrea Kathleen Zammit, Malcolm Vella, Stefan Farrugia and Alan Fenech.
Carlo Goldoni (1707- 1793), known as one of the masters of the comic stage, was a failed tragedian. His first works for the stage (although they never actually made it) were in fact tragedies. His first play Amalasunta - A lyrical tragedy did not, by his own admission, “make the choice of connoisseurs”. Goldoni limped around Italy pursuing various adventures, throwing out the odd plot now and then for travelling theatre companies until in 1745 he received the commission to devise a play for a famous Truffaldino. Thus The Servant of Two Masters was born to a scenario, pinned to the side of the stage, from which the commedia dell’arte troupe would improvise their play. The production was a huge success. However, this was one of Goldoni’s last plays in the commedia style because from then on Goldoni began to insist that the actors should have a script and do away with improvisation. In fact, this play was rewritten later in text form, that is, with a script.
Commedia dell’arte, founded in Italy, was a popular theatrical tradition which became a transnational form during the Renaissance. Its improvised plays were performed by a company of actors; each one specialising in a stock character. The most famous of these characters was Harlequin. Harlequin was a Zanni, a servant; a comic character, hailing from the mountains of Bergamo, who was both as thick as a post and sly as a fox who specialised in all sorts of acrobatics. Each actor developed this character in different ways, and changed his name in order to be differentiated from other actors. In our play, we don’t have a Harlequin, but a Truffaldino, since Antonio Sacchi, the actor for whom Goldoni wrote the part, was specialised in this role.
Not only were the commedia plays a rattle bag of characters from different classes, they were also a jumble of styles. Actors who played the lovers would pride themselves on the beauty of their poesy, while the zanni would excel in the mechanics of slapstick motion. It was precisely this robustness that Goldoni desired to temper. In his opinion the commedia dell’arte had become decadent in the sense it was more concerned with the form of presentation than with the reality it represented. Goldoni’s instinct was that of a realist. So for good or bad he stepped into the fray and attempted to deal with the realistic psychology of the commedia dell’arte’s stock of characters.
The Servant of Two Masters is pivotal to this revolution in the Italian theatre. But it seems crucially torn in its allegiances. The piece sounded the death-knell of commedia dell’arte at the same time as it revelled in its stagecraft and absurdities. The play is full of lazzi - the moments such as Truffaldino serving the food and tearing up the letter - which were bravura flourishes that a skilled zanni would develop into a baroque set piece to delight audiences with his improvisatory skill and comic invention. Yet there is a tentative move towards making the crude excesses of the other characters more nuanced.
Throughout every aspect of the piece Goldoni seems divided between these twin masters of a love of a tradition and instinct for change. Like Truffaldino in the play, through luck as much as design Goldoni managed to serve conflicting ends simply through mastery of common stagecraft. And in the process of killing off commedia dell’arte, he has, in fact, served to keep it alive to this day.
The play
The action takes place in 18th century Venice. Clarissa, daughter of Pantalone dei Bisognosi, and Silvio, son of Dottore Lombardi, are being betrothed. Suddenly, Federico Rasponi comes into the picture. This proves to be a shock for all concerned, because supposedly this Federico, who was promised to Clarissa, was believed to be dead. What nobody knows is that this Federico is actually his sister Beatrice disguised as a man, and the real Federico is really dead. The story complicates itself further through the antics of the servant Truffaldino, when he simultaneously gets a job as a servant with two different masters, Federico (Beatrice) and Florindo. So not all the complications are of his makings, because Florindo is in fact Beatrice’s lover. But neither Truffaldino nor Florindo nor anybody else know this. The comedy is full of comic elements which sparkle with invention.
Jaume Villalba Sanchez
Jaume Villalba, a Catalan director, choreographer and actor living in Germany, has worked with Carlo Boso (Paris), Michele Casarin (Venice) and Antonio Fava (Reggio Emilia), three masters of commedia dell’arte with whom he had the opportunity to learn the techniques and dramaturgy of commedia.
In Munich he founded the Theatre ensemble I Piselli, specialised in commedia dell’arte, physical theatre and street theatre, creating at least two original pieces every year. This group won the first prize for the Best Play and Performance at the International Festival of Theatre in Agadir 2005 with the original commedia-play La Vie est un arbre, performed in the French and German languages.
Since 2003 he has been teaching commedia dell’arte at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University of Munich. Apart from this, he has been conducting workshops on commedia and physical and mask theatre in Germany, Spain and lately at the Alberta University in Edmonton (Canada), something which he is now doing in Malta with Maleth.
Besides commedia dell’arte, Jaume likes to experiment trying to combine commedia with other theatrical forms, like mask theatre, abstract theatre and dance-theatre. In 2006 he directed and played in The Peonies Pavilion, an adaptation of a Chinese opera into movement theatre. Next year he plans to start a new cooperation project with the Russian National Theatre in Kiev, Marat-Sade by Peter Weiss, in which he will be doing physical training, the choreography and acting. In his work he tries to find other ways of using theatre: during the Bosnian war he worked in several refugee camps using theatre and dance as a means of overcoming war traumas.
Recently Jaume was with a theatre production in Canada: Romeo + Julia, a Binational project with professional actors of the Russian National Theatre Lessija Ukrainka from Kiev (Ukraine) and German actors of the Theatre Academy and LMU-Munich. In this project he was responsible of the physical training of the actors and also the choreography. This was a special project in three languages (German-Romeo and the Montagues, Ukrainian-Juliet and the Capulets, Russian-Brother Lorenzo and Escalus) and the group was trying to put together two different ways of doing theatre: the German way, based in concept and text, and the Ukrainian one, more based in body and emotions. The combination adopted the form of the poor theatre started by Jerzy Grotowsky and Peter Brook.
His contacts with the Maltese theatre are very recent: last spring he was in Malta working as director and choreographer with a group of Maltese actors including Narcy Calamatta and Andrea Kathleen Zammit, who will be acting in the Goldoni production.