‍CarloCecchi: Feydeau for young actors‍

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Text by Massimo Marino‍

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Tailor for a Lady (1886) is Georges Feydeau's (1862-1921) first major success and the model for his relentless three-act comic theater. Relentless because he creates to clockwork devices that, once started in the premises of the first act, can only advance automatically, overwhelming the characters in their garbling in the second half, until the dissolution entrusted to the final episode. There is in this author, who lived in the French Third Republic, something ancient and absolutely consubstantial to his times. Ancient is the machinery of comic situations, which cannot fail to precipitate into an exponential series of misunderstandings, of exchanges of person, of qui pro quo, triggered by the urgency of sexual desire, satisfied, in a hypocritical respectable society, with the lie of amorous subterfuges. Modernissima - Belle Époque - is the urge to laugh at everything, in spite of everything, to live to forget the dead of the Franco-Prussian War, the rows of corpses of the repression of the Paris Commune, to celebrate the new wealth of a satiated and arrived bourgeoisie that keeps to at bay the boredom of professional life and the accumulation of money by giving itself to the good time with the theater, the café-chantant, with love affairs. Who dances in that Titanic about to collide with the iceberg of the Great War.

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If you read a Feydeau play you are struck first and foremost by the very detailed captioning that precedes each act: he assigns to each element and prop a place, dividing the stage into areas marked from numbers, infilling the rooms with doors that refer to other rooms to allow all sorts of unexpected appearances and sudden, opportune disappearances. In Feydeau we notice a very modern spirit, which makes its own the achievements of what was to be the new theatrical art of the twentieth century, the direction, the arrangement of the actors in a demiurgic plan of meaning, of significance, organized from an absolute master of the stage who governs and disciplines the creative outbursts of the performers. The machine first and foremost.

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Tailor for a Lady begins in Dr. Molineaux's house, develops in an apartment that the protagonist rents to meet his mistress, a former tailor, and ends, with the clarification of misunderstandings, in the place of the first act.

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At first the room from bed of the doctor, who sleeps separately from his wife, turns out to be untouched. The protagonist has stayed out of the house after a failed attempt to meet his mistress, Mrs. Aubin, at the Opéra. Dragged from friends he was late; returning to home he realized he did not have his keys and therefore fixed himself to sleeping on the landing. When his wife discovers his nocturnal absence the trouble begins, multiplied by the arrival of his mother, Moulineaux's mother-in-law, of a friend, Bassinet, who would like to rent to the doctor his vacant premises, the visit of his mistress and the arrival of her husband, who is made to believe that Bassinet is the doctor. These are the preconditions for a plunge into the chaos of misunderstandings in the second act, aggravated by the fact that the door of the rented atelier from tailor has been unhinged from Bassinet to regain possession of the apartment: anyone can thus gain access and the whirling game of lies must be continued to avoid bringing the trysts to light. The last act laboriously puts everything to back in place: identities resume their flimsy consistency, clarifying roles so that (possibly) nothing changes.

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What does all this become in the hands of Carlo Cecchi director? Cecchi is a notorious subversive of the boring, predictable, let's call it director's theater, which assigns insurmountable boundaries to actors, which reduces the infinite variables of the stage relationship to preordained plans. In his career he has traversed tragedy, Beckett's Woyzeck and Finale di partita, Petito's farce and Eduardo's farce (his disenchanted, desolate Sik-Sik, the magic maker, still lingers in the eyes). He has embodied the corrosive comedy of Molière and the derailments from everyday life of Harold Pinter and Thomas Bernhard; he has traveled in the multiplicities of Shakespeare, repopulating with Hamlet, Measure for Measure and A Midsummer Night's Dream a fascinating and destroyed theater space such as the Garibaldi Theater in Palermo's Kalsa. He brought to the stage his great friend Elsa Morante, more Shakespeare and Pirandello, a disenchanted Henry IV and more with Marche Teatro.

As a director he has always been first and foremost an actor and master of actors (how many of his "students" populate today's scenes, from Alfonso Santagata and Claudio Morganti to Arturo Cirillo, Scimone and Sframeli, Valerio Binasco, Iaia Forte and I could go on). So of great interest is this Sarto per signora with young actors who graduated from the Silvio D'Amico Academy of Dramatic Art: Anna Bisciari, Lorenzo Ciambrelli, Doriana Costanzo, Marco Fanizzi, Vincenzo Grassi, Ilaria Martinelli, Sofia Panizzi, Marco Selvatico.

Danilo Capezzani, assistant director, a graduate of the directing courses of the same Academy, last year to Spoleto with one of his own Riccardo II, helps us to reconstruct a long work, which began with the classic rehearsals to table, first of in-depth analysis of the text, then of first interpretation of the lines. The next stage was to put "on its feet" theopera, with an editing that lasted more than forty days. "Carlo," he anticipates, "wanted to choose this text, this author, this type of theater both because it is quite forgotten lately on our scenes and because for the students it is a great test of theatricality. Feydeau, it was said, writes perfect theatrical machines, and interpreting it means dealing with frenzied rhythms, in which one must always respond to time, with continuous surprises and changes of pace that require performers with well-receptive "antennae." Continues Capezzani: "It is a difficult text, with roles written for actors of an older age than boys." But the novelty, the directorial and dramaturgical coup de scerna, was the cut of the third act: there is no fictitious solution in Cecchi's staging. The knots remain tangled in their intricacies, there is no reunion of the couples. In short, we add, explosions and implosions of desire are not stemmed, there is no hypocritical appeasement, no unraveling of the complexities of desire. No recomposition is possible. Ultimately, the cipher of Feydeau's world (and ours as well) triumphs: appearance.

Capezzani again guides us: "Set design and costumes are faithful to the era in which the play was written. Among the simple stage elements stands out the doorway to the rooms, the threshold through which the characters make their entrances and exits, generating, with the constant misunderstandings, highly comic situations. For the rest, there is a large carpet. The costumes, made from Maria Sabato, are late 19th century."

And the actors? "For the boys," our Virgil continues, "it was an exciting ordeal to work with a great master like Cecchi. The initial disbelief and fear produced a concentrated effort that, combined to a productive effort, made it possible to get to the end. The result will be judged by the audience.