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Roberto Benigni at Theatre Royal – A review by The Telegraph

Italian national hero, Benigni, delivers one-man show Tutto Dante – a comical yet serious enterprise.

By Cassandra Jardine (The Telegraph)

The atmosphere at Roberto Benigni’s one-man show Tutto Dante (“Everything about Dante”) was more akin to a football match than a night at the theatre. With tutti gli Italiani in the UK, it seemed, assembled at the Theatre Royal, there were whoops and stamping feet before the man himself even bounced on stage, accompanied by circus music and whirling lights.

Benigni has long been a national hero in Italy. Climbing over the seats to collect his Oscar for the 1997 tragicomedy La Vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) was only the most conspicuous of his acts of iconoclasm. Since the 1970s he has been adored as a satirist of Italy’s politicians. But, over the past three years, he has added to his hero status through his touring show dedicated to Italy’s medieval literary giant, Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy.

But before Benigni got down to the serious business of the evening, he acted as his own warm-up artist. His jokes about Italy’s prime minister Silvio Berlusconi raised easy laughs, but were none the less funny for that – not least because he delivered them in English. The advance publicity had said that the show would be in Italian, with no surtitles (because he improvises), so the shift was greeted with relief from the minority of the Brits – and sighs of disappointment from the Italians. “It will be like Mr Bean in Rome talking about Milton,” said Benigni. But despite his comic delivery, this was a serious enterprise, a homage to a great era of 13th- and 14th-century Italian culture.

In the years immediately before Dante (1265-1321) was writing, he explained, the Florentines (of whom Benigni is one) gave us our banking system (ho, ho), the piano and violin, the artistic breakthroughs of Giotto and the lettered notes in which our music is written. To him, however, The Divine Comedy is the period’s crowning achievement, the first poem in which the author uses “I” and reflects contemporary life.

Having never got much further than the famous first line: “Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita,” my Italian became increasingly stretched as he explained various nuances of his chosen section, the Fifth Canto of the Inferno which deals with lechery.

By the time he reached the final section – a recitation of the poem itself – I was out of my depth. It didn’t matter. He recited the words so animatedly, but with such reverence for the 11-syllable lines, that it was like listening to great music. Millions of Italians have so far risen to their feet to cheer at the end of this show; this evening was no exception.

Apr 06, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post

Tutto Dante: Roberto Benigni puts on one Hell of a show

The Italian comic is taking Dante on a world tour with his TuttoDante and London’s his next stop.

By Alastair Smart, 31 March 2009 – Telegraph.co.uk

He shot to movie stardom in 1998 with his concentration-camp comedy Life is Beautiful, and Italian funnyman Roberto Benigni is now attempting the improbable once again: a one-man, stage rendition of The Divine Comedy, Dante’s cosmos-bestriding, medieval epic of sin, salvation and the everlasting. The clown prince of Italy, famous for stripteasing on television and writing songs such as Hymn to Loosened Bowels, has spent the past three years reciting Dante’s theological terza rimas in arenas across Italy. And now there’s a world tour.

‘At heart, The Divine Comedy is popular entertainment not an academic text,’ says Benigni. ‘Besides the God, Virgin Mary and Thomas Aquinas stuff, there’s Laurel-and-Hardy farce in there, too. It’s not called a “comedy” for nothing.’ Because of the august, bowdlerised translations of Victorian times, Dante has come down to English-speakers today as a rather fustian, Christian moraliser but, in certain scenes in hell, he gets pretty ribald. One can only imagine what fun the goofy-grinned, gangly-bodied Benigni will have with Canto XXI, in which 10 devils try poking Dante up the ‘groppone’ with their pitchforks, and their leader – the aptly named Stinky Tail – breaks wind ‘like a trumpet’ to call them to attention.

‘Dante’s not just funny, though; he’s contemporary, too’, insists Benigni, trying to explain the huge popularity of his TuttoDante shows, which have been watched by one million Italians. By the early 14th century, Dante’s home city of Florence had become the international capital of trade and banking, and the poet lamented how many of his corrupted peers – especially popes – valued riches over religion. ‘He places the gluttonous and greedy in hell … [to wallow] in excrement like pigs,’ says Benigni. In this, the age of the fallen banker, ‘their story couldn’t be more modern’.

In a 90-minute show, Benigni hasn’t time to recount Dante’s entire poetic journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, so he picks out and performs 10 passages instead, explaining the context and present-day parallels of each beforehand. In these secular times, it’s perhaps unsurprising the Inferno passages prove most popular: ‘They’re the most human’, says Benigni, ‘the ones in which we all see our weaknesses.’ But Italian audiences also love Hell for the modern celebs Benigni suggests sending there, notably his long-standing foe Silvio Berlusconi. The Italian PM has been the butt of countless Benigni barbs down the years, and there’s no let-up in TuttoDante – in a show last year, the comedian declared that the imperious Berlusconi would have a ‘circle to himself’ in Hell, with ‘his own set of laws’.

Benigni promises to make his targets more international on TuttoDante‘s world tour, which comes to Drury Lane next Sunday, though he doesn’t know yet who they’ll be: ever the comic improviser – remember the mad clambering over seats, on his way to collect his Best Actor Oscar for Life is Beautiful? – all Benigni can confirm is that, Dante excerpts aside, he’ll deliver the show in English. But might the time also be right to readdress the hell of the Holocaust, which many felt Benigni trivialised, sentimentalised and pantomimed in Life is Beautiful? Benigni, a Catholic, played a jovial Jew who convinces his young son their death-camp travails are just an elaborate game. ‘My movie was actually a tragedy, about a father trying to save his son from horror; it had humour in it, but I wasn’t laughing at or diminishing the Holocaust,’ says Benigni. ‘The Jews are the world’s wittiest people, so if anyone can make a comedy about the Holocaust, it’s them.’

The Divine Comedy (1314-1320) is, in a sense, as old as the Italian language itself – it was Dante who broke the centuries-old tradition of writing in scholars’ Latin, to use vernacular Italian instead – but Benigni reckons he is well qualified to deliver it as freshly as ever: growing up in rural Tuscany, an hour outside Florence, he took up early the Tuscan tradition of publicly reciting poetry, especially that of the local hero Dante. ‘My grandma was better, though’ he says. ‘She could recite the entire Divine Comedy backwards.’

‘TuttoDante’, Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London WC2 (0844 412 4657) Apr 5

Mar 31, 2009 | 0 comments | View Post
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