On Pulchi Shake and Spear : An interview with Bruno Leone

Bruno Leone is a Neapolitan puppeteer who played a crucial role in the revival of the traditional Neapolitan guarattelle theatre: a typical glove-puppet theatre performed in a puppet booth, usually in the street, mostly improvised, and centred on Pulcinella (Figure 1), ¹ a character or ‘mask’ [maschera] from Commedia dell’arte. In 1978, he met Nunzio Zampella who had given his final performance and sold his puppets and puppet booth a few months earlier. Convinced of the importance of safeguarding the Neapolitan glove puppet theatre, Leone became Zampella's student. On 1 May 1979, he put on his first show, ² and the following year he held his first workshop, which was attended by Salvatore Gatto and Maria Imperatrice, who later became guarattellari (puppeteers performing with guarattelle). Since then, he has performed in various contexts (streets, schools, theatres, festivals) and continues to train new puppeteers. From 2000 to 2002, he set up the Scuola delle guarattelle, where Salvatore Gatto and Gaspare Nasuto also taught, and where several guarattellari, such as Irene Vecchia and Gianluca Di Matteo, were trained. He builds his own puppet booths and puppets and has a rich repertoire of new shows. In 2019, to mark 40 years of activity as a puppeteer, he opened a static theatre in Naples: Casa Guarattelle ‘Nunzio Zampella’. ³

This interview was conducted on 24 May 2023 at the University de Montpellier Paul-Valéry on the occasion of the international conference ‘Portrait of the puppeteer as author’ organised by PuppetPlays, a research project funded by the European Union (Horizon 2020, European Research Council, Grant Agreement 835193).

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Cahiers Élisabéthains: What is distinctive about Neapolitan puppet theatre?

Bruno Leone: Neapolitan glove-puppet theatre is known as guarattelle – it is perhaps the oldest form of puppetry in Europe. Its origins are unknown, but it already existed in the 1500–1600s and one may trace a continuity since then, even if it has undergone transformations because it is based on an oral tradition. The first written playtexts to date are mine¹ and those of maestro [Roberto] De Simone. ⁴ In England, in the 1800s, the Punch and Judy show was very similar to the Neapolitan repertoire: I found many similarities with the Punch scripts, even though ours were only oral. Then, if you study them more closely, you discover that there are similar traditions in Persia, in Egypt, where glove-puppet theatre is also said to have existed since 1200. We do not know if it actually originated in Naples, but Naples was certainly the place where this kind of theatre flourished, a major centre from which it was already circulating in Europe in the 1600s.

This puppet theatre owes its distinctive nature to its puppets, Pulcinella being the main character. Pulcinella speaks with the specific voice that you get with the pivetta [swazzle], an artificial voice that can be found in other glove-puppet traditions of the world, even in Iran and China.

Cahiers Élisabéthains : What kinds of shows do you usually create with your puppet theatre?

Bruno Leone: There is a basic repertoire that I learned from Zampella, and then I am constantly carrying out new research. I have registered about 60 new playtexts with the SIAE (Italian Society of Authors and Publishers), always with Pulcinella as protagonist, not only using puppets, but also working in close collaboration with musicians and actors.

Cahiers Élisabéthains: What is your target audience? Is it an adult audience?

Bruno Leone: Guarattelle is a popular show that appeals to all kinds of audiences. In nineteenth-century engravings you can see an adult audience watching the play, with children peeping behind them. Apart from school performances, my audiences are mainly adults but with a strong presence of children. This is very important because children are less conditioned by the mass media – their approach is much more authentic, much more intense, and this in a way helps to shape the adults’ spectating experience. Recently, I have noted an evolution: my theatre is becoming increasingly popular with young people, even university students, who discover this world and return to it with pleasure.

My work is very varied: right now, in Montpellier I am giving a show on Shakespeare; on the 26th of May I will be in Florence with a play without Pulcinella, La fine del mondo [The end of the world], adapted from a book by Giuliano Scabia; and on the 28th I will be in Ravenna with the traditional show.

Cahiers Élisabéthains: Am I right in supposing that having children in the audience is refreshing and stimulating?

Bruno Leone: Absolutely. I like to say that this show is really for adults, but the only serious adults I know are children … What is refreshing about children is their involvement, the questions they ask. This interaction gives the shows a lot of vitality; they often grasp aspects that adults don’t see.

Cahiers Élisabéthains : Is this Neapolitan puppet theatre, which almost disappeared, a form of puppet theatre that had been devalued?

Bruno Leone: It exits on what one might term a ‘secret market’, a parallel market that is not that of the mass media. Seen from the inside, this theatre enjoys, I can say, enormous success. There are more puppeteers playing Pulcinella in the world today than there were in the 1800s or early 1900s. Unlike mainstream theatre audiences who go to the theatre to see a new show, our audiences love to see the same show over and over again. It works with mechanisms that are actually based on a live relationship, with the participation of spectators who are one of the components of the show. Each performance is different because there are unpredictable elements, the strongest being certainly the audience.

Cahiers Élisabéthains: Do the puppets in your shows speak Neapolitan?

Bruno Leone: In general, yes. Sometimes I have done shows in French, but it does not work very well. It's the same with English, but in Spanish it works, maybe also because I have worked a lot in Latin America. In Italy I use more Neapolitan. When I want something to be understood, I say it in Italian, but in general the main problem is the rhythm of the show, because the Neapolitan language is certainly best suited to express the right rhythm: the audience's understanding is a rhythmic one, of breathing, not an understanding linked to words.

Cahiers Élisabéthains: You say that reception is through the senses and the body, not through the intellect. Can you explain how you approach this when you perform abroad?

Bruno Leone: The use of Spanish was prompted more by a desire to play with the language, which is characteristic of Pulcinella, than from a need to make myself understood, because the show in Neapolitan is intelligible and actually works very well all over the world.

In any case, I generally take the traditional repertoire around the world more than my plays. Some shows go down very well in Italy, for example the one I did on the Divine Comedy, because obviously everyone knows it well, but I have never proposed it abroad. This is the first time I have taken Pulchi Skake and Speare ⁵ out of Italy. In fact, an English writer had seen it in Naples and he loved it, he really wanted to take it to England; but then – perhaps I am not very good at promoting myself – this came to nothing.

Cahiers Élisabéthains: What gave you the idea of working on Shakespeare and mixing his works?

Bruno Leone: All this started with a friend of mine, an important Neapolitan man of the theatre, who was programming a festival on Shakespeare and who asked me to do something with my guarattelle. Even though I love Shakespeare, have read his entire work and seen many of his plays, I struggled to find a play I could adapt to puppet theatre, so I came up with this idea of mixing.

Macbeth was the starting point. That was the first ‘adult’ book I read as a boy, and I remember that I liked it very much. With hindsight, I understand why: I was a teenager (maybe 11 or 12 years old) and until then I had only read fairy-tale books or Pinocchio. A strange thing is that reading Shakespeare for me has always been undemanding, just like reading comic books. At night, before falling asleep, reading Shakespeare was pleasant because it flowed calmly, it didn’t require much effort, so it has always fascinated me.

Why does a boy like Macbeth? The child, the adolescent, judges the world of adults very badly – a world of traitors that betrays the ideals and the purity of childhood – and Macbeth in some way dramatises this very process: Macbeth is a good man who becomes bad, at the instigation of Lady Macbeth, but above all because of a desire to grow, to succeed. Another consideration, which is linked to that, is that children are actually fascinated by villains, by violence, especially in puppet theatre. I am, as it were, a champion of puppet violence. Some people say that it is an incitement to violence: in fact, children actually adore it, precisely because it is an exorcising of violence. Violence of the kind they may have experienced is turned into ridicule in the puppet show which thus offers a form of catharsis.

We are passionate about theatre when it stages villains. My idea was to explore this in Shakespeare's world, especially the world of tragedies and therefore of villains (‘villains’ in various ways: the worst villains are actually Macbeth and Richard III; Romeo and Hamlet cannot be considered villains, and Othello himself is in some way a victim). I wanted to enhance this world precisely through puppets, where the villain is the protagonist. But unlike what can happen in actors’ theatre, in puppet theatre villainy has a liberating and cathartic value because it remains abstract.

Perhaps one of my most interesting experiences was my first performances of Pulchi Skake and Speare ⁶ in a working-class neighbourhood in Naples, for a school of adolescents. It was Scampìa, one of the neighbourhoods with the highest crime rate, and where those children did not even know who Shakespeare is: in my view that was important. I wanted to see if the show worked in a situation where audiences are unacquainted with Shakespeare. It worked well; there was a very heated debate afterwards, because I was accused by some parents of using dirty words and violence. But the children instead defended me in these aspects: they said that that was part of the theatre and argued that the play represented the power struggles that also exist within criminal organisations. Shakespeare in some way made them relive their everyday reality in a ‘liberating’ way. Let me give you an example: the Gomorra TV series is condemned by many people because it is viewed as extolling violence as if that were the only reality. But in puppet theatre, it works in a completely different way. With puppets, it is possible to go very far with violence without offending, without causing damage. This is something that does not work with actors, especially when the performance is realistic.

Obviously, then other ideas emerged, such as the idea of representing the story of Romeo and Juliet as a clash between glove-puppets and string-marionettes. These two kinds of puppets have always been in conflict with each other, because the burattini were considered more popular theatre, while the marionette is associated with a more aristocratic theatre: two families really at odds with each other, who cannot meet, whereas the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet tells us precisely that love overcomes differences and distances.

Othello's play is an exaltation of Shakespeare's tragedy in Pulchi Skake and Speare, because Othello is nothing more than a transformed Romeo and he thinks that Juliet – whom he imagines to be Desdemona – has betrayed him with Romeo, therefore with himself. Othello then remembers that he was Romeo, he realises that he has killed his woman, who loved him and not someone else. It heightens the intensity of the tragedy, but performed by puppets it also becomes funny.

Even Hamlet is an exaltation. ‘To be or not to be is not a problem’ had become almost a slogan at a time in Naples because I had already used it in another play. Pulcinella takes the skull, kills a camorrista and then says ‘to be or not to be is not a problem’. Hamlet redeems himself by becoming like the others, but somehow, he obtains justice. This is also important, because often the villainy of puppets is a vindictive villainy, not linked to ambition – it puts things right. I am not certain if this can always be found in Shakespearian characters, because generally their villainy is accompanying their desire for power.

So, once we had the idea of no longer staging a specific play by Shakespeare, but of working on this general theme, the part with the traditional number between Mr Punch and the Baby that I included into Pulchi Shake and Speare was precisely to exalt that type of villainy. The children go crazy when they see the Punch and Judy show in England, they are amused to death when Mr Punch kills the Baby, because it becomes a paradox and it is done in a surreal way. Where is the problem? That the liberating function only works when the staging is paradoxical, abstract. When it is realistic, then it becomes disturbing.

Cahiers Élisabéthains: We were wondering whether this idea of combining puppets, as in Romeo and Juliet, is also a way of introducing the public to the variety of puppetry?

Bruno Leone: It's just a game. The way I practise my craft as a creator is somewhat unusual. When I have an idea, I write it down, like a dream. It is not intellectual work, because that would limit the possibilities. I rely on inspiration. They just happen. I had never worked with string-marionettes before and I had the idea of doing this. I also force myself, because I do not master this animation technique, but I did it anyway. I do things like that, without knowing why, and I usually don’t find out all the implications until later. It is not done with an intention, because the work is free; it is a mysterious and magical process, like dreaming. Freud analyses dreams in order to understand human reality, and dreams bring to light things that consciousness is unable to do. That is another reason why this creative work resembles dreaming rather than reality: dreams have this ability to bring together things that are not normally supposed to be associated, but which turn out to be true, and in the end it works.

Cahiers Élisabéthains: We were also wondering whether, apart from Shakespeare, you work on other classical authors?

Bruno Leone: I have played Don Quixote by Cervantes, and I have also played Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, ⁷ which is a very important work for me. I’ve also performed Mozart's Don Giovanni, or rather my own Don Giovanni ⁸ : I had studied all the Don Giovanni that are classics, by Molière or others. Another classic I have performed is Pinocchio.

Working on the classics can also be seen as working on events, on the French Revolution, ⁹ for instance, or the Neapolitan Revolution. When I worked on the French Revolution, I studied Robespierre's speeches and other texts, and when I worked on the Neapolitan Revolution, I also studied a lot of writings. And then I go on to invent something that perhaps uses what I have studied and grasps its meaning in the way I have already described.

But there is another way of working on the classics, where I want to pay homage to an author. Paying a tribute to an author means respecting their text in its entirety. For example, I made a play about Garcia Lorca in which I staged his text without changing a comma, which was the ‘Scene of the Lieutenant Colonel of the Civil Guard’ from the Poema del cante jondo, and in this case I respected the text completely. In Pulchi Skake and Speare I also tried to respect the text, but I realised that I had to respect the significance and not the full text, because it did not work well. For example, I do not use the extant opening monologue of Richard III but I respect the text; even the dialogue of Romeo and Juliet somehow respects the text, and the texts from Macbeth, even though they are in Neapolitan, are faithful. For shorter pieces, the author's text is fully respected, in a larger work it is more a question of incubation.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Bruno Leone with his puppet booth and his Pulcinella (2006). Courtesy of Anna Leone.