Venetian Longings. Goldoni’s last carnival before leaving the Serenissima

Those who complain that they would like to make a living from literature but cannot, because advances on novels are pitiful and it is always the hack writers with their rubbish who end up being successful, should think carefully about the fact that in the year in which "Una delle ultime sere di carnovale" was first performed (1762), Carlo Goldoni was 55 years old (which today would be equivalent to 65–70) and, just a few months earlier, he had been considering the possibility of leaving the theatre and returning to practise as a lawyer – a profession he had abandoned without regret almost twenty years earlier. He had written and staged, for example, La locandiera, La bottega del caffè, Il campiello, that comic masterpiece La trilogia della villeggiatura, and dozens of other memorable comedies – but all this had not been enough to enable him to prevail over his rivals in the arts (above all the younger Carlo Gozzi, who was vying with him for the favour of the Venetian public with his brilliant theatrical fairy tales) nor, above all, to make him, if not rich, at least well-off.

Leave the theatre? Change careers, return for good to desks and stamped paper? Fortunately, there were a fair number of admirers of Italian comedy in Paris, and Goldoni’s plays were well known and appreciated. In 1761, he was offered the post of director of the Théâtre Italien and accepted. He initially intended to leave Venice for a limited period, but although his experience in France proved disappointing for a number of reasons, Goldoni continued to live between Paris and Versailles, no longer as a playwright but as a tutor to the daughters of the King of France, and he died in Paris thirty years after leaving his hometown. What does all this have to do with "Una delle ultime sere di carnovale"? It is relevant because, on the verge of taking his leave of his city and his audience, Goldoni decided to transform that choice he had made in life into a theatrical plot.

Friends and colleagues gather at the home of the fabric manufacturer Zamaria to celebrate Carnival. They chat, play cards (the game of Meneghella, which Goldoni spends three full pages explaining the rules of – though, to me at least, it remains incomprehensible), dance, and someone declares their love to someone else; weddings are on the horizon. Among the guests is Anzoletto, a young fabric designer who has just received a job offer in faraway Muscovy. He is set to leave, taking his beloved Domenica, Zamaria’s daughter, with him.

A simple allegory: the character of Anzoletto – age aside – alludes to Goldoni, who is preparing to take his art far from Venice, and who is partly resentful and partly grateful (“I have remembered the favours and benefits I have received”), and swears that he will always carry “the name of Venice carved in his heart”. This allusion is, in truth, all too easy, given that towards the end the plot becomes rather flimsy, and Anzoletto ceases to be Anzoletto and becomes Goldoni himself, delivering a somewhat incongruous moral: “Believe me, my friend, the finest pursuit is that of understanding people’s characters, drawing on good examples, and correcting oneself by seeing in others those things that do not seem right…”. Is such reflection credible coming from a young weaver who is surely barely literate?

The plot is not memorable, nor are the characters; indeed, there is no shortage of plot jumps, gaps, and vaudeville-style contrivances. Is it really acceptable that Madame Gatteau, however frivolous she may be, should switch so casually from loving the young Anzoletto to loving the old Zamaria? And Anzoletto, by the way: why is he so determined to go to Muscovy? His business is not suffering; he has customers, friends, and is well liked. He adores Venice, and—he says—each time he has left it, he could not wait to return. And now? To leave it for good to seek his fortune amongst the barbarians? No, it makes no sense. And it makes even less sense when it turns out that Domenica loves him and he loves her. Zamaria is happy to give her to him in marriage, but on condition that they stay in Venice, because he doesn’t want to die alone (not ‘it’s for your own good!’ but ‘it’s for mine!’: it was a sincere era).

And so Anzoletto comes out with this baffling stream of consciousness: “Let what must be, be; I’ve made up my mind, I’ve promised, and I have to go. If I didn’t go, people wouldn’t say: ‘He’s not going because he’s had a change of heart’; they’d say instead: ‘He’s not going because they don’t want him to’.” In other words: he is prepared to leave Venice, his family, his friends, his job, and the girl he loves in order to join forces with an elderly woman and travel to Russia (who knows, perhaps not even to Moscow, but to some dreary little village in the oblast, some marshland between the steppe and the tundra), to depart for good, because he knows full well he will not be returning, and the others know it too (Bastiano: “Oh! I don’t think he’ll ever come back”) – he is prepared to make this string of sacrifices simply because he does not want people to talk behind his back and say that the Muscovites did not want him, that it was all a load of rubbish, mere bragging. A madman.

Ultimately, the most engaging character is Alba, a sweetly complicated young woman, to quote the classics, or, to put it another way, a delightful, delightful, delightful pain in the neck: childish, whingeing, hypochondriac, moody, passive-aggressive, the sort who says she wants to go home to sleep and a minute later drags her husband onto the dance floor. Charming, she appears to have been plucked straight out of "Smanie per la villeggiatura," which, for the record, is a considerable compliment.

Not for the plot, not for the characters. Why, then? For the ensemble, one might say, if this were music rather than theatre. The plot is extremely thin; practically nothing happens until three minutes from the end, and then in those three minutes everything happens at breakneck speed because it is time to bring down the curtain. The characters remain little more than shadows on the wall, with the exceptions of Alba and the endearing Madame Gatteau. Yet is there perhaps any Goldonian comedy in which the World – that ‘Book of the World’ which Goldoni believed he had read more thoroughly and better than his predecessors – bursts onto the stage with such impetuosity and such harmonious choral unity, all at once? So many characters—about fifteen—so many scenes taking place simultaneously; a comedy of chatter with so many voices chasing one another, overlapping—utter chaos: the reader-spectator wonders how it is possible not so much to remember the lines as to remember one’s own turn in the conversation each time (and having to speak in Venetian, no less!). In fact, when I read it years ago, I told myself that it was quite simply a play impossible to stage, and, if not impossible, so complicated as to make one wonder why on earth one should make the effort, when there are so many fine Goldonian plays with just three or four characters and clear, crisp dialogue to bring back to the stage.

However, reading "Una delle ultime sere di carnovale" in the book—which is not particularly enjoyable—is quite different from seeing it on stage, where the voices that are difficult to distinguish in the text (one of those tiresome works that force readers to keep switching between the lines and the list of characters printed at the start) take on a life of their own, a distinct character. And the challenge – the sheer number, the variety, the frenetic pace – sharpens the ingenuity of those capable of bringing it to the stage.

In a famous 1968 production, Luigi Squarzina had emphasised the parallel between Anzoletto and Goldoni, whilst suggesting that the character’s fate mirrored that of the misunderstood artist, a brilliant mind fleeing a conformist environment: so much so that he had decided to intersperse the play’s lines with two long excerpts from the Mémoires, in which Anzoletto-Goldoni addressed the audience directly to explain his decision to leave Venice. I have not seen Squarzina’s production in the theatre (although the 1970 television version is available on YouTube: hypnotic in the first few minutes, like all the old black-and-white RAI programmes, but unbearable after a quarter of an hour), but I do not believe I would have appreciated it. With the benefit of hindsight, mind you: perhaps, in the whirlwind of ’68 moralism...

Valerio Binasco – who is now staging this comedy at the Carignano, having previously directed "Il bugiardo" (2013) and "Arlecchino servitore di due padroni" (2018) – has chosen a different perspective. We spoke during a break in rehearsals.

“In those years, outside the theatre, there was a wind of freedom – the ideas of the philosophes, the great revolutions on the horizon – which deserves to be recorded and brought to the stage. Freedom means that the customs and opinions of young people reveal just how obsolete the customs and opinions of the older generation are; that women cease to obey men; that even the grim Zamaria seems to claim the right to happiness, even to frivolity, and becomes engaged to Madame Gatteau – not out of love, for love belongs to the young, but out of a desire for freedom”.

So, a comedy about the sudden emergence of freedom in people’s lives. “Not just people in general,” Binasco clarifies, “but ordinary folk.” And more specifically, not the lower classes of servants (who, it seems to me, are given greater prominence and visibility in the stage adaptation than in the book) but that small or middle-class urban population who made a living from their trade. “There is a comic Goldoni who leads directly to Italian comedy, to the light-hearted, carefree take on neorealism (I’m thinking of "The White Sheik," "I Vitelloni," and Germi); and then there is an almost Chekhovian, or Dickensian, Goldoni, who recounts the stories of ordinary people grappling with the simple – and mostly bitter – facts of life. No traces of nobility: Anzoletto is no Romeo Montecchi, Momolo is no Hamlet. The stage is a pedestal, and Goldoni – at least this Goldoni, who is the one that truly interests me – wants to make everyday life visible, as conspicuous as if on a pedestal, precisely.” Early in his career, Binasco acted in Branciaroli’s Antigone. “Branciaroli loved the emphasis, the grandiloquence of heroes and heroines. He used to say that nobody gives a damn about seeing Antigone frying an egg. I, on the other hand, am really interested in the fried egg.”

The set design is in keeping with the characters’ status and the mundane nature of their lives: a large, unadorned table, simple furnishings, very basic coloured garlands, and in the background the tools of the trade one might find in a warehouse – all looking rather shabby. Consistent with this, during rehearsals Binasco gave a whole series of directorial notes in the spirit of understatement, toning down any excess of enthusiasm, excitement or boisterousness (“This isn’t a Disney cartoon!”, ‘There you go, a lovely party, but a sad one’; and toasts, yes, but without shouting): the only one who’s a bit boisterous is Madame Gatteau, who is rich and, what’s more, French; everyone else are decent folk who scrupulously observe good manners – perhaps a little too much so (too much, because it gives the impression that they aren’t enjoying themselves all that much).

Yet the amateur reader or viewer is always left wondering how it is possible to fit fifteen actors onto the same stage, all speaking at once, without the result being utter chaos. This is not just a problem for theatre practitioners. In Lectures on Literature, Nabokov writes that Flaubert has ‘a particular technique that might be called the method of counterpoint, or the method of parallel interruptions between two or more conversations or sequences of thought’. He meant that Flaubert is particularly skilful at rendering naturally those scenes in which several people are speaking at once, and the contributions follow one another in no particular order. ‘I must make the same conversation bring to life,’ he writes to Louise Colet, ‘five or six people (who are speaking), many others (who are being spoken about), the place where they are, the whole village, whilst physically describing people and things […]. If only I had a bit of space! Instead, everything must be swift without being dry, and developed without being verbose.’

This isn’t just a problem for theatre people, but for the director and actors of "Una delle ultime sere di carnovale", this problem presents itself on an XL scale – and not just for a single page, but for two hours. When, at the end of rehearsals – after an afternoon of meticulous fine-tuning of the finer details – the cast performed the extremely long, highly intricate dinner scene in which Zamaria hosts his guests, I would have expected an endless series of interruptions and restarts, and endless interventions from the director, who was still not satisfied. But no, these are people who know their stuff: they run like clockwork.