Modern Language Review

Established scholars David George and Jordi Lladó have joined forces to produce this original study of the commedia dell’arte in Catalonia covering the early modern period to the present day. They address the literary form as well as its stage life and relationship with the plastic arts and education.

The book comprises five chapters. Chapter 1 encompasses the early modern period down to the nineteenth century, analysing such texts as the Entremés del ball dels ermitans (1753), staged in the Rosellón Theatre, or the Entremés de les burles d’Isabel, an eighteenth-century Mallorcan text inspired by a Castilian entremés originally written by Luis Quiñones de Benavente. In the nineteenth century historical figures such as Bertoldo and Bertoldino provided inspiration for authors such as Josep Robrenyo, Frederic Soler, and Joan Molas i Casas. In the carnivals of the 1860s, various troupes and companies of Pierrot clowns and harlequins were allocated specific functions. Ferran de Sagarra established a harlequin circle and inaugurated the Pírric Theatre with Arlequí viu i mort.

Until the end of the nineteenth century, Catalan harlequin-style theatre had foreign origins. The form did not become genuinely absorbed into local theatre until the period of so-called Modernisme, the subject of the second chapter and undoubtedly the high point of the commedia dell’arte in Catalonia. On the one hand, the Onofris’ Pierrot-syle pantomime offered a broader range of registers than that of the earlier Charles Debureau on Barcelona’s theatrical avenue par excellence, the Paral·lel. The success of the Onofri family inspired other Pierrot clown artists such as Enric Adams or Ventura. Conversely from a literary perspective, works by Santiago Rusiñol, Apel·les Mestres, and Adrià Gual registered the influence of the written and staged tradition of the commedia dell’arte through the depiction of rounded characters such as the Clown in Rusiñol’s L’alegria que passa (1898). From a formal perspective, the influence can also be detected in four original pieces by Mestres: Pierrot lladre (1906), Els sense cor (1909), Mascarada (1915), and Blanc sobre blanc (1924). Gual’s relation to the form is explored in two guises. As a scholar, he vindicated the genuinely popular nature of the tradition in Chapters 2 and 4 of El geni de la comèdia (1912). He also employed it in his dramaturgy, most visibly in La família d’Arlequí (1927).

In Chapter 3 George and Lladó explore the use made of the theme by a series of authors such as Víctor Català, Ramon Vinyes, and Josep M. Massó i Ventós. [End Page 405] The last of these, in a short piece entitled El temps que passa (1909), depicts a Pierrot clown stripped of modernist transgression and set against the backdrop of the classical Noucentisme movement in Catalonia. At the same time, Mestes presented in Els sense cor a character of a different age, an idealized guardian of the essences of the ‘heart’. The authors then move towards the period after the Second World War, examining the work of Joan Brossa, an author as fascinated by the commedia dell’arte as he was engaged by contemporary Catalan culture. Brossa’s extensive Poesia escènica shows how the link with the commedia dell’arte, placed in a different context and with the historical vanguard as a reference point (Artaud, Grotowski, perfomance, happening), established links with paratheatrical forms—carnival, mime, circus, music hall, magic, etc. George and Lladó also establish comparisons of texts by Brossa and Lorca with the commedia, the chapter closing with a study of Josep Palau i Fabre’s work. In the fourth chapter the authors focus on staging and sets, examining Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, Joan Ponç, Fabià Puigserver, and Calixto Bieito. Bieito staged Pierrot Lunaire by Schoenberg in 1987. Chapter 5 acknowledges the sporadic nature of commedia productions in Catalonia, and...