The Impossible Tempest: Giorgio Strehler or the Director as Interpreter

Abstract

During his fifty-year career, the Italian director Giorgio Strehler (1921-1997) staged more plays by Shakespeare than by any other playwright, but only a few of his most recent and successful Shakespearean productions have received international critical attention, and The Tempest he directed in 1978 is among them. Thirty years before however, in 1948, he directed a first, completely different production of the same text. Starting from the theoretical assumption that a theatre performance, as object, exists only in the moment in which it is actually produced, that is, in its reception by the audience, this dissertation has a twofold purpose: to explore the different contexts in which the two productions directed by Strehler were staged, and to underline how, from the beginning of his career he developed a crucial attention for interpretative techniques culminating in the 1978 Tempest. Aside from being based on the same text and from being produced by the same ensemble, the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, though with two radically different acting and technical troupes, the two productions of The Tempest directed by Strehler enlighten the variety of dynamics – from historical, political, and cultural, to more specifically theatrical, technical, and dramaturgical – which interacted within him while he was working at the staging of the play, and emphasizes the centrality of the director in contemporary theatre. Finally, this dissertation examines how the pragmatic process of rehearsal might modify the director's theoretical approach to a text, and shows how the study of a performance consists not just in the quest for its meaning, but in the investigation of how the text is brought to the stage, to that coalescent point that, in order to materialize, demands active participation and involvement from both interpreters and spectators.