The Questors Theatre - The Fan (2001)

Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) was a man of many parts. Despite early success in the theatre, he happily settled into a career as a small town lawyer and he was already forty when - after much persuasion - he reluctantly agreed to become a full-time playwright. In the next twenty years he wrote about 150 plays, and set about his self-appointed task of reforming the Italian theatre, at that time still ruled by the out-dated conventions of the by now moribund Commedia dell'Arte style. With his early plays he persuaded the Commedia actors to follow a script instead of improvising, and to remove their masks.

However, it was with his later plays that he effected a real revolution in Italian theatre, introducing a degree of naturalism and psychological subtlety into his writing that had not been seen before. He was revolutionary, too, in his themes and his sympathies, focusing on ordinary working people and the rising middle-classes, and showing particular insight into the lives of women, who usually - as here - outwit and dominate the men in his plays.

This dramatic revolution was by no means unopposed, and such was the hostility of his arch-rival, the thoroughly conservative Carlo Gozzi, that Goldoni was ultimately forced to leave the country. Goldoni's revenge - typically - was mild and comparatively good-natured, but it is not without relevance to our play tonight that Gozzi was an aristocrat - a Count, in fact - and that his plays are often described as 'fables'.

After leaving Italy, Goldoni moved to Paris, where he wrote The Fan, but it is a thoroughly Italian piece, a celebration of outdoor, communal living, where everyone lives a little too close to their neighbours, where perceived notions of social status and sexual role are continually under challenge, and where private emotions have to be played out in a very public space.

Goldoni retired from the theatre not long after writing The Fan and became Italian tutor to the daughters of Louis XVI at Versailles, but he continued to write, and his Memoirs give a wonderfully lively picture of the period. His opera libretti were set by, among others, Mozart and Haydn, and it is Haydn - that most civilised of composers - who provides the music for our production of the work of this most civilised of writers, with his early 'Times of the Day' symphonies, written - like The Fan - in 1763.

Goldoni's end was not what one might have wished for so amiable and generous a 'man. After the French Revolution, he was deprived of his pension from the King, and, old and half-blind, faced the direst poverty. When his case was raised in the National Assembly, the Deputies unanimously voted to restore the pension of so radical a writer and so noble a champion of the rights of the common man. Sadly, unknown to them, Goldoni had died the previous day.