Taking the Theatre to the People: Performance Sponsorship and Regulation in Mussolini's Italy

When Benito Mussolini became prime minister of Italy in October 1922, the men (usually men) of Italian theatre had for some time been wailing its imminent demise. Yet, at the 1934 Volta Convention on the theatre, organized by the Royal Italian Academy (an institution created by the fascist government), experts from around the world—Maurice Maeterlinck, Gerhart Hauptmann, Jacques Copeau, Edward Gordon Craig, Alexander Tairov—came to discuss the state of the art, which had yet to take its last breath. Still ten more years later, in 1944, Silvio D'Amico began to write The Theatre Must Not Die, a call for the rebirth of Italian dramatic theatre after a disastrous twenty years (the period known as the ventennio fascista), in which the regime's interventions could best be summarized, he wrote, with the Duchess of Chevreau's crack about Richelieu: "The good, he did poorly; the bad, he did well."¹ At every turn throughout his eighty–page essay, D'Amico found reason for complaint, for if he couldn't rightly charge the fascists with doing nothing (at least they, unlike their liberal predecessors, thought the government should support the theatre), he consistently lamented that they should have done more or otherwise. Given his authoritative position—he was a cultured, insightful, and demanding critic and the director of the National Academy of Dramatic Arts, which opened in 1936—The Theatre Must Not Die, published in 1945, came to serve as the first major account of theatre history under fascism.

Ever since, that book's characterizations have guided common understanding of dramatic production under Mussolini, which amounts to a series of predictable but not necessarily accurate claims. Underlying it all is the notion that the theatre was losing ground to the fledgling sound cinema, and Il Duce's (the Leader's) preference for the latter only aggravated the situation. All further damage, as typically reported by theatrical and cultural historians, was the result of fascist autarky, paternalism, and cultural vapidity: closed borders and strict censorship killed the creative spirit, the campaign for national unity and against dialect culture marginalized potential audience members and talented artists who could have given rise to the new Italian theatre, explicitly propagandistic performance was a priori devoid of artistic merit (unworthy of further investigation), while state-sponsored shows that were not obvious propaganda do not even fall within a category we might call "fascist theatre." In her recent social history, for example, Patrizia Dogliani recognizes that the theatre received heavy funding but argues that the "principal objective was to ensure that theatrical performances were consonant with the regime's politics and that they were Italian plays, written in Italian."²

Such depictions are, however, shaped more by assumptions about what fascism was—and was not—than by the research conducted. They are the result of a generalized view of fascism as a simple onagrocrazia ("government by asses"), as Benedetto Croce famously coined it, and of a more complex set of circumstances having to do with the writing of history in a highly charged postwar climate that encouraged the denigration of all things fascist even while several structures and personages of that regime remained standing. In the theatre, there were many of these remaining structures and personnel. And so, the need to criticize and establish distance was felt not only by those who had been illdisposed to Mussolini's government but also by those who benefited from it regardless of whether they had been particularly sympathetic.³

That researchers begin with the premise that an illiberal, violent, and intensely bureaucratic political caste would necessarily manage even its arts in the same illiberal, violent, and blindly bureaucratic fashion is hardly incomprehensible. However, it also means that the area is underresearched, and, at times, studies are poorly framed or inadequately contextualized.⁴ This ideological problem is compounded by disciplinary and national-linguistic divides: some solid theatre history pertaining to the period has of course been done, largely by Italian specialists; but their work struggles to find an audience in colleagues who might be interested in the ventennio but...