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Gramsci on Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Abstract

Our occasional series on early Marxist theatre criticism – which has already included Trotsky on Wedekind in NTQ28, Lunacharsky on Ibsen in NTQ39, and Mehring on Hauptmann in NTQ 42 – continues with two essays by the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, whose concepts of hegemony, the national-popular, and the organic intellectual have had a profound influence on twentieth-century western thought. From 1916 to 1920 Gramsci was also a theatre critic, writing a regular drama review column in the Piedmont edition of the socialist daily newspaper Avanti! in which he first explored ideas about the ideological function of theatre. His review of a 1917 Italian production of Ibsen's A Doll's House is a particularly strong example of his attempt to generate notions of the theatre as an arena of political struggle in which the cultural values of the bourgeoisie were expressed, but which also had the potential to subvert these values and provide the proletariat with the critical wherewithal to express its hegemony. He saw the function of the theatre critic as promoting social, cultural, and moral awareness in the spectator, and Ibsen's play as a particularly apt vehicle for critiquing the moral superficiality of Italian bourgeois women in its powerful portrayal of the oppressions of a patriarchal society. While Gramsci's review of A Doll's House can be seen as a forerunner to contemporary feminist ideas, he saw Pirandello's use of the ‘power of abstract thought’ as making him a potentially revolutionary playwright, whom he described as ‘a commando in the theatre’. His plays were ‘like grenades that explode inside inside the brains of spectators, demolishing their banalities and causing their feelings and thoughts to crumble’. After reviewing ten of Pirandello's early plays for Avanti! Gramsci later expressed his intention of writing a full-length study of the playwright's ‘transformation of theatrical taste’. All that came of these intentions were the rather fragmented notes he made in the Prison Notebooks, in which he expressed his views on Pirandello in the context of the politics of culture and the idea of a national popular literature. Gramsci saw Pirandello's metatheatre as subverting traditional dramatic principles, but failing to establish new ones or to subvert the social and economic aspects of tradition. Gramsci responds to the critical debates on Pirandello in the 1920s by Tigher and Croce about Pirandellism's combination of art and philosophy and its conflict between ‘life’ and ‘form’, but his final comments about his views being taken with a ‘pinch of salt’ indicate that they are not definitive.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

Notes and References

1. Emma Gramatica (1875–1965) was a leading actress of the 1900s with a wide and successful repertoire. Her film work included Miracle in Milan.

2. A fortnightly, later monthly, literary review founded in Florence in 1886.

3. After studying in Palermo and Rome, Pirandello took his degree at Bonn in 1891 with a thesis on Greco-Sicilian dialects.

4. World view.

5. A reference to Gramsci's reviews of Pirandello's plays in Avanti! from 1916 to 1920.

6. , Gramsci's note: ‘Compare “Lazzaro” ossia un mito di Luigi Pirandello, Civilta cattolica, 5 04 1930’.Google Scholar

7. A Turin newspaper of Catholic persuasion.

8. A Catholic writer.

9. Not Il turno, but Lontano (Novelle per un anno, Mondadori, Milan, 1937, p. 3, 7, 31 ff).

10. Adriano Tilger (1887–1941), an anti-idealist philosopher and critic.

11. Silvio D'Amico (1887–1955), theatre critic, and author of a number of books, including Storia del teatro drammatico (four volumes, 1939–40).

12. A Catholic cultural review, founded in 1850, and published and edited by Jesuits.

13. Italo Siciliano (b. 1895), literary critic and professor of French at Venice, where he was also president of the Biennale.

14. A pun on the title of Pirandello's Cosi è (se vi pare), usually translated as Right You Are (If You Think So).

15. Two essays by Pirandello, ‘L'umorismo’ and ‘Arte e scienza’, appeared in 1908.

16. Gramsci's note: ‘On the implicit world view in Pirandello's plays, see Benjamin Cremieux's preface to the French translation of Erico IV (Editions de la NRF)’.

17. Evrenov, Nikolaj (1879–1953), Russian dramatist, critic, and director, whose main theoretical work, Introduction to Monodrama (1909), anticipates some of the expressionists' concepts.Google Scholar

18. A play by Nino Martoglio, reviewed by Gramsci in 1916.

19. ‘Raids’ is in English in the original.

For the above notes I am indebted to Manacorda's, Giuliano edition of Gramsci's Marxismo e letterature (Rome: Riuniti, 1975)Google Scholar, except for No. 18, which is from , Forgacs and , Nowell-Smith, Antonio Gramsci: Selections from His Cultural Writings (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), and Nos. 14 and 19Google Scholar, which are mine.