Alberto Benedetto. Brecht e il Piccolo Teatro Milano: Una questione di diritti; Massimo Bucciantini. Un Galileo a Milano

Summary

Massimo Bucciantini. Un Galileo a Milano. Bologna: Saggi Einaudi, 2017. 272 pages.

The privileged relationship between Bertolt Brecht and the Piccolo Teatro in Milan (PTM) is no secret, the PTM was the center of the “divulgation” and of icastic installations of Brecht's plays. Yet, the role the PTM played as a mediator between the holders of the rights to Brecht's estate, Helene Weigel and Suhrkamp Verlag, and all other Italian theaters had never been considered in depth before Alberto Benedetto's Brecht e il Piccolo Teatro. Una questione di diritti (Brecht and the Piccolo Teatro. A Matter of Rights). Benedetto, since 2009 production manager at the PTM, has delved into the PTM archive to uncover unpublished correspondence that sheds new light on the complex mixture of artistic vocation and ideological protection as PTM's directors Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler attempted to balance and exploit the grey area between exclusivity and exclusion.

Founded by Grassi, his wife Nina Vinchi, and Strehler on May 2, 1947, the PTM opened on May 14 with Maxim Gorky's The Lower Depths. The PTM was the first municipal theater in Italy. Antonio Greppi, the socialist mayor of Milan after the Liberation, granted Strehler and Grassi the Broletto Theatre in Via Rovelli, in the heart of the city, which the infamous Legion Ettore Muti, the political-military body of the fascist police, had made their headquarters during the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (1943–45). Strehler would later recall “the blood stains on the walls” (Bucciantini, 68). Thus, the PTM acquired a symbolic charge even before it started. The symbolism of the PTM and its setting is summed up in this passage from Grassi: “Theater … because of its intrinsic nature, is … the best tool for spiritual elevation and cultural education available to society among the arts… . [It] has to be considered … a collective necessity, a citizen's need, a public service, like the underground and firefighters,” Paolo Grassi had written in “Teatro, Servizio pubblico” (“Theater as Public Service”) one year before the theater's founding on April 25, 1946 in the socialist newspaper Avanti! (Bucciantini, 78). Consequently, the program of the PTM reads: “Every civilization develops according to a process that combines and integrates groups in their variety and multitude.