Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev ed. by Dassia N. Posner, Kevin Bartig and Maria De Simone (review)

The volume under review considers the whimsical comedy of three oranges as scripted, first, by Carlo Gozzi in eighteenth-century Venice; by Vsevolod Meyerhold in early twentieth-century St. Petersburg; and just a few years later by Sergei Prokofiev, whose opera is the best-known work of the three in the New World. An (equally) international collective of scholars offer erudite, insightful, and truly interdisciplinary readings of the dramatic texts, realized and unrealized performances, artistic controversies, and of a continuous creative absorption of ideas, styles, and techniques. The volume’s title is elegant yet unduly restrictive: In addition to the three titular artists, the book presents other seminal authors enamored of commedia dell’arte, such as German Romantics and Russian Symbolists, whose sensibilities and influences are specifically addressed in Natalya Baldyga’s and Vadim Shcherbakov’s contributions but resonate throughout the volume. Examining the pertinent theatrical, cultural, and critical history of the Italian masks, the book also brings to light some of the less famous yet remarkable figures (such as the theatre scholar and practitioner Konstantin Miklashevsky featured in Laurence Senelick’s essay, and the artist Boris Anisfeld in John E. Bowlt’s). As a result, the scholarly volume dedicated to a series of extremely fluid theatrical texts and events is as sparkling and fascinating as the delightful source material itself.

The main elements of the whimsical plot retained by all of its co-creators concern a prince first cursed by an inability to laugh and then sent on a romantic pursuit of three oranges, which eventually prove to enclose three fair maidens, one of whom becomes the prince’s bride. Each of the book’s three parts— “The Fiaba,” “The Divertissement,” and “The Opera”—contains a translation of a verbal script produced by Gozzi in Italian (1772), by Meyerhold in Russian (1913), and by Prokofiev in French (1919). The English translations are done, respectively, by Maria De Simone, Dassia Posner (who has also participated in rendering the rhyming verse in Gozzi’s text), and Kevin Bartig. The editors-translators have meticulously examined and coordinated the scripts to preserve and reveal borrowings, correspondences, and emendations. The scholarly precision, historical sensitivity, and literary quality of the three translations are matched by a theatrical thrust: all (re)create the vivid atmosphere (I might say, ecology) of live, audience-oriented theatre. As Posner observes in her sharp overview of the collection’s main goals and themes, the “fairy-tale manifestoes” by the three great artists are extremely relevant to our ongoing attempts to “rethink what is primary in stage performance” (3). The volume not only discusses but also invites stage practice. All translated texts are stage-ready: framed and enhanced by the research, they can be used in all kinds of training and studio work, interdisciplinary courses, and full-scale productions.

Gozzi’s “Reflective Analysis of the Fairy Tale ‘The Love of Three Oranges,’” written eleven years after its actual stage performance, is striking in its montage of scripted parts and “self-referential commentary,” which includes, in De Simone’s words, “descriptions of mise-en-scène, audience reactions, and Gozzi’s explanations of his formal experiments” (6). “Analysis” provides a conceptual trajectory for the collection not only as the origin of the itinerant plot, but also as a template for daring generic innovations, assertive self-awareness, and metatheatricality. The historical and histrionic background on Venetian theatre (provided by Alberto Benuscelli, Guiletta Bazoli, and Domenico Pietropaolo) is also helpful in building an arch from the past to the future, and vice versa. That commedia dell’arte inspired Meyerhold, Prokofiev, and other modernists is well-known, yet the essays in Three Loves reach beyond the triviality of “everything new is the well-forgotten old.” Ted Emery’s chapter, aptly titled “Carlo Gozzi’s Reactionary Imagination,” underscores Gozzi’s fierce anti-Enlightenment stance staged in his “imaginary fairy-tale worlds” (109), which...