Harlequin dumb out of fright

On Wednesday 22 January at 20.45 , the Pergine Theatre stage will feature one of the most widely performed canovacci in early 18th-century Paris, revived for the first time in modern times: Harlequin dumb out of fright.

The Stivalaccio Teatro production stages a grand tribute to the Commedia dell'Arte and the Italian peculiar ability to make a virtue of necessity, with direction by Marzo Zoppello. 

1716. After about fifteen years of forced exile, the Comici Italiani finally return to the stage in Paris, and they do so with a respectable company. Luigi Riccoboni in art Lelio, leader of the troupe, surrounds himself with the best Italian performers including, for the first time in France, the Harlequin Tommaso Vicentini from Vicenza (nomen omen), ready to replace the late and beloved Evaristo Gherardi. 

However, Vicentini did not speak French, an unforgivable deficit for the capital's audience. And it is here that Riccoboni's genius emerges in inventing an original plot where the servant from Bergamo becomes mute...out of fright!

The plot is the “classic” one of the Commedia dell'Arte, with a thwarted love and the lazzi and improvisations left to the characters and masks they bring to the stage.

Here the young Lelio, having left Venice and arrived in Milan, demands that justice be done. In his homeland he has fallen madly in love with Flamminia, daughter of Pantalone De' Bisognosi, largely reciprocated. However, the young woman's father has already betrothed her to Mario, son of Stramonia Lanternani, a cloth merchant, although the shy Mario loves Silvia, a resolute and determined young woman.

here is the reason for Lelio's coming to Milan: to bring Mario and his mother Stramonia to reason or, at worst, to challenge the young man to a duel.

The news should have remained hidden, but Harlequin, Lelio's servant, spreads it to everyone he meets as soon as he arrives in town . To reduce him to silence, his master plays a trick on him: he pretends that an omniscient demon is imprisoned in his own ring, and if Harlequin speaks, Lelio will learn of it and the servant will be beheaded.

Harlequin therefore decides to shut himself up in religious silence, becoming dumb... out of fright!

DIRECTOR'S NOTES.

This Harlequin, certainly original for the choice of the unpublished plot and for the desire to bring back to the fore after at least 20 years of silence the Commedia dell'Arte with its “repertoire” of tools of acting, singing, dancing, stage combat, lazzi and improvisation, reveals the choice of wanting to make an “art theater for everyone,” as the true and deep vocation of the StivalaccioTeatro.

A popular but richly inspired theater, in which the Commedia dell'Arte tradition is disassembled and reassembled with the tools of interpretation and reading of the 21st century; a show in which play, invention, love, fear and drama mingle, concealed by the immovable grimaces of the masks and the skill of the performers. 

A plot in which the twists and turns become entangled on misunderstandings, but which slowly unravel through the exploits of the characters. And if these slender affairs, set in a surreal and fantastic world, echoes of the Italian theatrical splendor of times long past, still manage to let the audience smile, perhaps in that precise moment the poetry of the theater, for too long silent and mute, can be reborn. 

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Based on the canovaccio Arlequin muet par crainte di Luigi Riccoboni
original subject and direction Marco Zoppello
with Sara Allevi, Marie Coutance, Matteo Cremon, Anna De Franceschi, Pierdomenico Simone, Michele Mori, Stefano
Rota, Maria Luisa Zaltron, Marco Zoppello
set design Alberto Nonnato
costume design Licia Lucchese
light design Matteo Pozzobon, Paolo Pollo Rodighiero
masks Stefano Perocco di Meduna
music advice Ilaria Fantin
hair and makeup Carolina Cubria
production Stivalaccio Teatro
in coproduction withTeatro Stabile di Bolzano, Teatro Stabile del Veneto, Teatro Stabile di Verona
with the support of Fondation Teatro Comunale Città di Vicenza, Fondation Teatro Civico di Schio