Commedia dell'arte influences

I have been reading this book now for a while, very sporadically, on Commedia dell’arte by Giacomo Oreglia. It’s an old book, but it has lots of information about the characters throughout the centuries. The main descriptions are the ones for the original characters, which might be why I and Hadleigh disagree whether “The Fool” is Harlequin or Brighella (to the left).
But I’m going to follow the books description here, to start of with.

Harlequin: the “second servant” (Brighella is the first).
His personality was to start of with very simple; he was stupid and constantly hungry. It’s now more defined though, he is gullible but still suspicious, cowardly but still obtrusive and is a mixture between naive and cunning, grace and clumsiness.
Opposed to Brighella, Harlequin doesn’t move the plot forward, but he makes the rhythm for it (which it says here is a far more complicated task). Therefore he is always moving, and very acrobatic. -->

Brighella: full name is Brighella Cavicchio, where “briga” means intrigue and “cavicchio” means pretext or excuse.
This is because Brighella always finds his way out of trouble. He is shrewd, cynical and without hesitation. He is a master of disguise and deceiving.
His purpose is to always keep the plot going forward with intriguing, mainly for his own benefit and pleasure. He can stop certain weddings and bless others, he flatters and plants suspicions and make talismans and love potions and whatnot.
He plays a whole lot of roles, not only the servant; soldier, innkeeper, executioner, thief etc.

And therefore I think that Brighella is more fitting than Harlequin, although Harlequin is the most popular and famous, and probably a lot easier for a young audience to recognise.
So we’ll se.

Quick presentation

Today every group had to tell the others what they had done so far, and it seems like we are all in the same stage (which is relieving).
We talked about the plot, and maybe I should explain it here as well;

There has been a bombing of an official building in Milan. Guilty of the crime is an anarchist, or at least that’s what the police think. They arrest him and interrogate him, it’s just that in the middle of that process, or that’s what they say, he jumps out the window.
A day or two after that, the police arrest the anarchist really (at least they are slightly more certain) responsible for the crime.
A district attorney (judge) comes to the police office to investigate, and closes the investigation with the final words: the accident can be described as accidental.
The play starts about a month after the anarchist’s jumping out the window, with a man being held at the police station for interrogation. He has histromania, which is an obsession with playing roles. Always. Everywhere. And he starts at the police station.
The police officers get so fed up with his blabbing and confusing logic that they decide to let him go, but he forgets his papers, so when the policemen leave the office for a meeting with their boss, he comes back to get them.
While in the office he answers a phone call (playing the role of a police captain). That tells him a judge will come to the office to reopen the case of the anarchist.
He immediately takes on the role of the judge, and comes back with costume, and the second scene begins.
While in the role of the judge, he gets the policemen to trust him, and they let him in on all the nasty details and the corrupted relationship between the police and the court, as well as other high officials. They have tried to make the incident with the anarchist a suicide; that they had nothing to do with it, and want him to help them.
When a reporter comes to interview the police chief about the anarchist incident, the ‘fake judge’ insists that she should come in. The histromaniac (the fool as it says in the script) now takes on the role of a police captain from the head quarters’ scientific division.
The fool seem to be changing side. He welcomes the reporter’s criticisms, and slowly bring out more and more facts AGAINST the police officers, who he just a moment ago seemed to help.
It ends with the fool and the reporter together finding out the truth; the anarchist’s death was not suicide, as the police officers suggested, but in fact an accident (though influenced by the policemen’s methods and behaviour).

And that’s about it.

Now, me (Emelie) and Hanna (since Hadleigh is working) are going to go through the technical stuff with our tech-group and Peter.
It’s not going to be very complicated.

The First Post.

So, finally we've set up the blog for our theatre project, 'The Accidental Death of an Anarchist' by Dario Fo. The reason it's so late? Because there wasn't really very much to put down, unless a record of 'Day 1, read through play, day 2, read through play some more etc.' would have been at all productive.
We will, of course, scribble what we've been doing with our generous rehearsal time so far (as it happens, not enough...) but now we have enough stuff, for lack of a better word, to put into this thing. In other words, we've gotten all the preliminary stuff done, and we have moved into the real rehearsal process, so the real record of it can also begin.