Comic Roles in Italian Theatre between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

The contribution focuses on the comic roles of traditional theater and specifically on the brilliant with the aim of identifying, in the “anomaly” period of Italian theatre, the ways in which the actor refined the characteristics of his role to make them more suited to a character. Through the actor’s comic strategies and repertoire analysis it is possible to glimpse the brilliant’s shifts towards other comic roles and understand how in the new Italian dramaturgy the role tends to favor more melancholic and reflective tones. Particular significance is given to the Theatre of the Grotesque, where the brillante transforms into a raisonneur, a figure central to understanding Pirandello’s work. The analysis shows that some traits of the raisonneur were already present in the traditional brillante. It is plausible that the transition to the “theatre of the character” begins with Six Characters in Search of an Author and becomes established during fascism, with the gradual abolition of traditional roles. Finally, it can be asserted that the intrinsic peculiarities of the brillante persist for a long time in its “heirs.” By cross-referencing the chronicles of the time with the hereditary characters within a unified repertoire, I thus attempted to reconstruct the comic range of the brilliant to see that aspect of continuity that survived the changing theater system.