Aspetti del nonsense nel teatro italiano del primo Novecento: Petrolini, i futuristi, Campanile

The First Decades of the twentieth century represent the setting in which develops the dramatic activity of the famous comic actor Ettore Petrolini, as the Futurists playwrights and the humorist Achille Campanile. In their plays they show, in three different forms, the common tendency to use verbal, gestural and “di situazione” mechanisms, which have much to do with the world of the absurd, fully participating in the elements that constitute "the nonsense universe". The analysis of the three repertories show that the nonsense, even if exploited for comical, as in Petrolini's and Campanile's works, that in order to unsettle and perplex the audience, like in the intentions of Futurism, proves to be a expedient both effective and complicated. The nonsense is a rather marginal issue in studies of Italian literature, and this becomes even more evident if we narrow the search to the literature devoted to the scene and the performative moment. In fact the study of nonsense is often found as a corollary to the general theories on humor (as, for example, in studies of Bergson, Dupréel, Olbrechts-Tyteca) that are to grow outside Italy. Even Freud, in the early twentieth century, devoted some attention to nonsense in his book on wit, emphasizing the parallels between the logic of the dream, that of the crazy and that of the children's game, with particular interest for the pun. The main examples of nonsense literature belong to French Middle Ages, with resveries, fatrasies and fatras, and English nineteenth century, with the two Alice by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear's limericks. This fact justifies the abundance of critical studies relating to the English and French nonsense literature; the fact remains that nonsense can become an object of interest, and reserve major surprises, even on Italian soil, and not only in the comic. The Futurists, in effect, exploiting the verbal nonsense mechanisms to upset the public and bringing viewers their thoughts cultural revolutionary. Petrolini before them, albeit in a context far less aristocratic and without ideologic intentions, with nonsensical inventions and with a propensity for the absurd comedy that is programmatic, so it is strong, he drags the viewer into a kind of kaleidoscope of meaning that stuns and entertains at the same time. In the twenties Campanile received the legacy of its predecessors (who anyway work up about the thirthies) with a measure and a lightness that led him to exploit the nonsense in creating surreal situations and thoughts, without ever reaching the discomfiture of the absurd, and spread apart by the thought, ad libitum, in pseudo-logics fascinating as incredible. Futurism was born (and, ultimately, it maintains such) as a moving élite while desiring a very widespread distribution of its ideology, to reach the masses. Petrolini began performing in run-down Variety places, in an environment characterized by a chronic lack of resources, before a popular but demanding audience often fierce against the comedian who does not immediately meet his favor. Campanile was born wealthy and middle-class family and is introduced to work as a journalist by his father (who does the same job). Despite so much more numerous are the social circumstances and practices that divide the three research subjects, compared to the aspects that unite them, one can recognize in their work using the same tricks about-nonsensical, like double meaning, contradiction, erroneous reasoning, unhinging of the cliché and twisting of phrases and proverbs. The Futurists through the synthesis, Petrolini especially (but not only) with its "macchiette", Campanile thanks to Tragedie in due battute and regular comedies, make the nonsense a material of great interest for the study of the early twentieth century Italian theater.