Analysis: embracing the notion of Irishness became a way for theatre to continue in wartime Italy without having to worry about fascist censorship

By Antonio Bibb, University of Trento

"Did you see Mourning Becomes Electra by the English"

"Hold on, I guess you're not up to date! Didnt you check the posters? He was English until June 1940, then he became American. As of December, hes Irish!"

This fictional dialogue was reproduced in a 1942 cartoon about playwright Eugene ONeill, whose being Irish, American, or even English, seems to have been a matter of debate among Italian theatregoers in fascist Italy. But why were Italian satirical magazines concerned with the nationality of playwrights while the country was involved in a global conflict?

Scholars have pointed out that fascist censorship had generally been more interested in unorthodox ethics and potentially dangerous ideas rather than in the origin of writers. Nevertheless, as soon as Italy joined in the war in June 1940, a ban on English and French playwrights was issued, which would be extended to U.S. writers immediately after Pearl Harbour.

Censorship measures went hand in hand with other forms of nationalist propaganda and in the years coming up to the war, one of the most popular "genres" became that of presenting anti-English views expressed by the English themselves: articles, booklets, collections of essays featuring damning statements pronounced by English (or at least English-speaking) intellectuals mushroomed. Anything could be used to attack the "perfidious Albion": decontextualised excerpts forcefully extrapolated from George Bernard Shaws plays or political commentaries from Chestertons autobiography.

It is then that a theatre magazine, Il Dramma, really came into its own. Il Dramma was quite popular among amateur companies since it regularly published both contemporary and classic scripts of Italian and international dramatists. The magazine spearheaded this conflation of political propaganda and literature, even though its editor in chief, Lucio Ridenti, was not an ardent fascist.

The first issues after the declaration of war presented anti-English barbs by the usual suspects, Shaw, Lord Byron, Aldous Huxley, and published a surprising number of Irish plays, excluded from the ban because of Irelands neutrality in the war: the likes of Synge, Yeats (primarily known as a playwright in Italy), Lady Gregory, Joyce, Paul Vincent Carroll, Lennox Robinson were either translated for the first time or re-published after their first and usually not greatly successful early publication in book form. More importantly, authors such as Wilde and Dunsany were presented as Irish for the first time in Italy.

Ridenti was not alone in this, but was helped, and often encouraged, by Anton Giulio Bragaglia, a boisterous polymath who had started his career as a futurist photographer and had been one of Italys first theatre directors in the modern sense. At the time, Bragaglia was the director of the Teatro delle arti, a relatively small Roman venue (approx. 600 seats), which generally enjoyed more freedom than other theatres and as a result granted the regime a certain reputation for not crushing dissenting or unorthodox voices.

Bragaglia included Synge, O'Casey and other Irish dramatists in his programmes and often prompted Ridenti to publish more legitimate plays so that he could put them on stage. It didnt stop there. From the beginning of 1942, after the United States officially joined in the war, several American playwrights, whose works were officially banned, became Irish.

These writers (often called oriundi, Italian for foreign-born nationals) included some Irish-Americans such as Eugene ONeill, George Kelly, and Philip Barry, but also writers whose Irishness was rather more questionable, such as Allan Langdon Martin (pseudonym of the North-American Jane Cowl and Jane Murfin) and even Emily Bront, clearly on account of being born to an Irish father. In these cases too, however, the authors were presented as Irish, and some of their plays were even allegedly "translated from the Irish". Bragaglia and Ridenti resorted to every possible way of finding new plays to produce, even asking the Irish Minister to Italy, Michael MacWhite for books and help.

The reason for this was of course political, although we should not imagine that Ridenti and Bragaglia had suddenly developed an interest in Irish politics ("OCasey and the others have already bored us enough with Irish patriotism" once wrote Bragaglia): enlarging the notion of Irishness was an easy way for Il Dramma to publish them without worrying about fascist censorship.

The ruse also allowed Bragaglia to dodge payment of staging fees, as the Minister of Popular Culture, Alessandro Pavolini, had passed a law allowing such fees to be waived when enemy countries were concerned. It is even possible that the idea had originated in the Ministry itself, or that it was at least approved by Pavolini, who allegedly told Bragaglia on 20 September 1940 that Americans born to Irish parents should be considered Irish. After all, this would be consonant with fascist principles about ethnicity, as people born in South America to Italian parents (called oriundi too) were considered Italian and, among other things, could be capped for the national football team.

The subterfuge certainly raised the status of Irish drama in Italy and helped young Italian writers gain a certain familiarity with the literature of Ireland, however large and generous the extension of the notion of Irishness had become. A future protagonist of Italian literature, the then 19-year-old poet, playwright, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was so impressed by Synges work (read in Il Dramma in 1940) that he would stage it with his friends in his parents home.

A side-effect of exalting Irish culture was also to undermine Britains and U.S. cultural relevance. In this sense, Ridenti and Bragaglia were perfectly aligned with the general tendency of fascist cultural propaganda. Unsurprisingly, it was also part of Bragaglias rhetoric to present such acts as part of a cultural war, as he made clear in a letter to Ridenti: "I put on plays as acts of war authorized by the Italian State, at war with America."

Antonio Bibb is a translator and a lecturer in English and translation at the University of Trento (Italy). He is the author of Irish Literature in Italy in the Era of the World Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RT

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