The Girl With the Painted Face (57 page)

The trestle stage at the other end of the room is complete now. The backdrop depicts a deserted street, and a little raised platform, draped in swagged cloth, stands to one side: a mountebank’s stall. Leaning against the stall is a lute.

Standing on the little space behind the backcloths, Sofia peeps through the narrow chink between the two canvases and peers out at the audience that awaits them. Seated in the two largest and finest seats at the front are the duke – middle-aged, bearded, stern-looking, dressed entirely in black – and his latest duchess, the third in line, the little Spaniard who cannot, Sofia is sure, be much more than seventeen or eighteen. Wide-eyed and fresh-skinned, she looks more like Signor d’Este’s daughter than his wife, though it is well known that the Duke of Ferrara has no children.

Beside and behind the duke and duchess are some three or four dozen dignitaries, all finely dressed in rich, vivid silks and damasks. Many gems and precious metals are glinting on necks and ears and fingers in the candlelight. It is, Sofia thinks, by far the most prestigious and glittering audience she has seen, and a moment’s unease settles on her at the sight of them, making her pulse race and her stomach churn.

Beppe comes to stand just behind her.

Turning, Sofia tilts her face up to his and he makes as though to kiss her, though stopping short a fraction of an inch from her carefully painted mouth. ‘Ready?’ he says quietly.

Sofia sucks in a long breath and lets it out slowly through pursed lips, nodding as she does so. ‘I think so. It’s a bit more frightening when the audience is so… so…’

‘Well dressed?’ Beppe suggests. ‘That’s the only difference between them and any other audience, I reckon. They’ll laugh and cry in all the same places as any other audience, if we do our job well, won’t they?’

The others are beginning to gather at the foot of the little ladder: Cosima and Benedetto Morello, both beautiful and elegant and serene; Federico in his long-nosed and highly shining mask and Giovanni Battista with the newly mended fat belly which Sofia has carefully cobbled together with Dario’s buckram strips. The two older men are standing close to white-faced Agostino, who is muttering his lines to himself with silent animation. Lidia, padded up to look more stoutly matronly, nonetheless still looks sweet-faced and pretty; Vico, scratching up under his mask with a finger, bends towards her and whispers something in her ear. Shaking her head, she looks down at her belly, rubbing a hand gently over the as yet hardly visible swelling there.

Sofia gazes at them all, and feels her mouth stretch out into a smile. The chalk and pearl ‘skin’ tweaks as she does so and, as always, she has to fight not to reach up and scratch.

‘Happy?’ Beppe whispers.

Sofia looks up at him. ‘Oh yes.’

‘Right,’ Vico says, scrambling up the ladder and edging past Beppe and Sofia. ‘Off we go. Twenty bars from me on the lute, then you’re on.’ He flashes a quick grin at Sofia, then slips out between the two hangings, and, at the sight of him in his grubby flour-sack costume, the audience begins to applaud. The sound crackles around the room like flame and the players straighten, readying themselves for the start of the show.

Sofia looks fondly at them all again, then sideways at Beppe. ‘
As much as actors love applause
,’ she says quietly.

‘What? What’s that?’

‘Nothing. Just remembering that day in the little clearing near Malalbergo.’

Beppe tilts his head enquiringly.

‘The day you started teaching me to act.’ She pauses. ‘That pile of declarations – remember?
Just how much do you love me? As much as actors love applause
.’

‘Oh yes – what was the other one…
as much as a blade loves a whetstone
? God, it seems so long ago.’ Lifting her hand to his mouth, he kisses her knuckles. ‘Before you ask, I think if you asked me the same question today, my answer would be…
as much as… ooh, as much as Arlecchino loves to cause trouble.
’

‘That much?’ Sofia is smiling. ‘Surely not.’

Head on one side, Beppe considers. He grins and shrugs. Running a thumb along her cheekbone, he says, ‘Well, now you ask, probably a little more than that, but it’ll do for now.’

Vico’s music builds to a crescendo and stops. In the second’s hiatus of silence that follows, Beppe holds aside the backdrop and he and Sofia step onto the stage.

Afterword

by Pete Talbot, Artistic Director, Rude Mechanical Theatre Company
 

Beppe’s background story:
the Commedia dell’Arte

This story begins in Modena in 1582 and the troupe of travelling players introduced to Sofia by the quack apothecary did not – like bearded Daniel Day-Lewis – carefully research their characters so that they were ‘realistic’. That ambition for theatre doesn’t begin until quite modern times. Conditioned as we are by cinema and television we might think actors are supposed to imitate the ‘real world’, but for thousands of years up to the twentieth century they did not. They were always just actors telling a story and more often than not, as we would say today, ‘in your face’. The tradition Gabrielle Kimm has brought alive for us was called the
Commedia dell’Arte
.

These players included improvising ‘fools’ in masks who barked like barrow boys, leapt like monkeys and stood on one leg to play the mandolin, literate actors who kept speeches in commonplace books and learnt them by heart, lovers and
servetti
with painted faces (hence the title) who moved with the grace of Renaissance dancers and talked with the lyricism of poets; all assembled on the spot on trestle stages in a dynamic interchange with raucous crowds gathered outdoors in the piazzas of cities like Venice, Naples and Bologna – the whole guided by a scenario written up on a board which gave it shape and plot. The key point is they were the first professionals – as opposed to the
Commedia Erudita
played by wealthy and literate amateurs with written scripts in fine houses for fun, the
Dilettanti
.

Commedia dell’Arte
suggests a fraternity of professional actors (‘Comedy of the Artists’), led by a charismatic actor manager, who were ‘licensed’ by the authorities to perform in public places (according to the great contemporary actor/playwright cum political activist and ‘general nuisance to authorities’, Dario Fo, whose workshops at the Riverside Studios in London I was lucky enough to attend in the 1970s). The connection between Fo and
Commedia
is interesting, and not just because his wife, Franca Rame, is directly descended from a
Commedia
family, but because of the ‘general nuisance’ bit in relation to authority. The troupes were part of what the critic Bakhtin called the ‘carnivalesque’ tradition; activities on the streets which marked the beginning and end of Lent (during which, of course, meat –
carne
in Italian – could not be eaten), much of it anti-authority of a kind that went all the way back to Ancient Greek carnival. The point is, if you have traditionally ‘scheduled’ occasions when everyone is out behaving badly together it’s hard to pin it on anyone in particular, so it allowed for satire, direct criticism and sometimes downright rebellion against the ones with the power.

This brings two things together. Firstly, the craft of acting in Italy had reached such a level of quality in the mid-1500s that actors could band together like the guilds and earn a living from it (not previously the case) – people were prepared to pay for it, with proper contracts and agreements with authorities – and, secondly, the fact that people were out on the streets and wanted to be entertained, especially, but not exclusively, at the beginning and end of Lent. The problem for the troupes was that here was an ideal opportunity for comedy at the expense of authority (always a good bet), but at the same time they didn’t want to bite the hand that fed them. If
il Magnifico
was going to pay and feed you for performing for his guests inside his comfortable palazzo you were not going to refuse, but there was a good chance you might annoy him. So there was always going to be trouble for the troupes, who regularly had to flee for their lives.

It is into this world, therefore, that Sofia arrives. Let’s start with the apothecary. The characters in a typical
Commedia
scenario are always ‘archetypal’, that is, they embody the essential qualities of a certain group of people. It helps to consider how cartoon characters work. Homer Simpson is an archetype; he is complex, he changes, he is absolutely himself, but simultaneously he is typical of a certain kind of American man. He is not a stereotype; he has been uniquely made, but he rings a bell for us. All
Commedia
characters work like that. Now it is not unlikely that quack apothecaries would be around actors, because they are associated with what became known as mountebanks, para-theatrical performers who mounted a trestle stage (in Italian,
banco
) and sold dubious cures or relics. In the tradition they were often called
il Dottore
(doctor). Typically they were used to poke fun at esoteric intellectuals, especially in Bologna, the oldest Italian university. They were charlatans – as were another group of archetypes, the
Miles Glorisus
type, or braggart captain called
il Capitano
. From 1559 to 1714 many of the Italian states were governed by Spain so what better archetypal character than the Spanish captain who pretends to be brave and virile, but is actually a coward and not quite the stud he makes out to be?

Probably most familiar of all is Arlecchino (‘Harlequin’ in English), Beppe’s character in the story. He is archetypal of a whole bucketful of qualities understood by Beppe’s audience. His genre is that of the
zanni
(remember ‘zany’, like ‘scenario’, another word from
Commedia
that’s crept into English), the poor and put upon servant. In Arlecchino’s case, while put upon, he nevertheless has limitless energy (albeit often negative, getting things wrong) and can never be kept down. You may be poor but you don’t have to give in. In his bent legs there is a kind of kinetic energy or spring which will shoot him back up again the more you press him down. The term
zanni
is a corruption of Giovanni or Johnny, and is not dissimilar to the relationship between Paddy and Patrick. Both
zanni
and Paddy are pejorative terms to describe outsiders brought in to do menial work (Paddy to build canals in Victorian England and
zanni
, the rural worker brought into the cities to carry bags). Arlecchino’s kind of
zanni
has other layers too. His diamond-covered clothes were originally leaves so his original form could well have been the ‘wild man of the woods’ or ‘green man’, or even, as it has the diminutive ending in Italian,
Hellechino
or
Herlechino
(‘Little Devil’). There is a clue in his mask which is black; African immigrants were associated with devils. At one point in the sixteenth century an actor, probably Tristano Martinelli from Mantua, recreated him as Arlecchino: man of the people, rebel, causer of chaos, downright ‘nuisance’ (with maybe a bit of African magic about him) who will annoy the rich and powerful just for the hell of it!

Another character in the story I ought to tell you about is Fosca, partly because you won’t find him on Google. The only reason I know about him is because I trained up the road from Modena at the International School of Comic Acting in Reggio Emilia run by the maestro Antonio Fava, whose family for several generations have specialised in scenarios associated with Pulcinella, a hooked-nosed Southern
Commedia
character from Naples, whose head pops like a chicken. (There were broadly two ‘social networks’, as we would describe these things today: Southern
Commedia
mainly emanated from Naples; Northern
Commedia
mainly from Venice and Bologna.) Fosca in Italian means ‘dark’ or ‘gloom’ and is a death figure with a skull mask who appears to Pulcinella from time to time causing him to race off in terror with his legs kicking in the air. He is the only supernatural figure in the tradition and is associated with the plague. Although the Great Plague of Naples wasn’t until 1665, later than his appearance in this story, he must have his origins in earlier plagues (and besides, poetic licence is fine). The plague was deep in the psyche of everyone all across Europe, so he is a very understandable archetype.

He is interesting to us Brits too. The first
Commedia
troupes came to England in the 1570s and were present at Queen Elizabeth’s travels to her subjects’ estates around England (almost certainly seen by Shakespeare), but they did not stay, because the Puritans who dominated the cities didn’t like female actors (of which there were plenty in the
Commedia
tradition). However, in 1662 Sam Pepys mentions in his diary he had seen ‘an Italian puppet play’ called
Punch and Judy
, including a character with a hooked nose with a wife and a baby (like Pulcinella) who is haunted by death, later a ghost and finally a crocodile. Of course, in the traditional
Punch and Judy
story Punch commits seven murders the last of which is ‘death’, so Pulcinella finally gets his own back! The English Puritans wouldn’t have the female actors, but were happy enough with them as puppets.

The Afterword to the Afterword

Sometime after 1648:
Pierre Beauchamp, dancing master in the Court of Louis XIV, is inspired by visiting
Commedia
troupes to codify the five positions of the feet in classical ballet based on the traditional movement of the Lovers (
Innamorati
).

1690s:
Tiberio Fiorilli (who created Scaramouche) brings his
Commedia
troupe to England. An English actor/producer called Christopher Rich realised the potential of the Harlequin story and started putting on what he called ‘Harlequinades’ at Drury Lane when Fiorilli left. He changed Harlequin’s character, to lover rather than rogue, and the rogue character became known simply as ‘Clown’ (which was taken up by Grimaldi 100 years later).