Recovery, verification, comparison and analysis are the identification tools of theater philology, on which the consistency and validity of theater historiography are measured.
14/01/2020
First, theater philology activates the recovery of all available (and pertinent) documents on an actor’s, or a playwright’s or a theater director’s work, or a production (or performance); secondly, it applies the verification of any kind of information about what concerns art, cultures and politics, which the documentary source houses; finally, it runs a comparison between direct and indirect data, and proceeds to study the concepts, facts and notions that emerge from the documents, in order to identify what we can individualise as the germ cells of a technique that has given rise and shape to a scene and its poetics. It is crucial to analyse documents in relation to synchronous social and political theses, theories and facts. What matters most is refraining from affirming conjectures on the basis of an interpretation which is supported by evaluations that come from the observation of conditions and facts that are contemporary to the historian and distant from the time of a theater event. We must be very careful not to take a meta-philological work for philology, because it would give rise to enigmas and paradoxes.
Undoubtedly, the incorrect application of philological rigor generates misunderstandings that could shape abstruse sophisms such as those ones we record in the second half of the Italian twentieth century in some fringes of theater historiography, which still continue to enjoy some credit today.
In Italy, and not only in Italy, starting from the Seventies, theatrology has been influenced by ideological tendencies inspired mainly by the philosophers Lacan, Guattari, Deleuze and Derrida, circumscribing a territory of theater studies in which beliefs have arisen that have contributed to the affirmation of a strong negationist current of the structured and codified forms of the theater. Woe betide who had uttered the word acting, not to mention the anathemas and the arrows hurled against those ones who could not avoid saying the horrible verbum "declamation"!
In so doing, it was denied to affirm that the great tradition of Italian theater had been nourished by a codified acting system, which had been handed down from the second half of the Eighteenth to the first fifty years of the twentieth century, managing to preserve the actors and actresses’ interpretations, recognizing instead the System born on the small stage in Pushkino and then on that of the Moscow Art Theater, as the first “serious” method of acting in the history of the theater. But the truth is another! Some significant cases are examined which, on the one hand reveal to us to what extent a philologically founded historiographic analysis allows us to understand the reasons that would have determined an incorrect evaluation of sources and documents, and on the other hand they clarify the reasons why "the erroneous assertion" was received as an incontrovertible truth, although it was the result of a cultural, ideological and epistemological misunderstanding. One wonders whether it is more harmful that someone has made a mistake, or that one neglects that a mistake may have been made, or that one refuses to question the mistake which had made, or what was not understood, with the same obstinacy of those Peripatetics who never wanted to look into Galileo Galilei's telescope.
There are some who argue, for example, that the affect theory of Enlightenment psychology is to be considered as the key to interpreting the whole theater, and therefore they pose the question whether acting should be a matter of inspiration or technique, and whether the actor would simulate or live the feeling he plays. We understand that this controversy can exert great fascination on the educated and erudite people, educated in everything but not in theater.