In a certain sense, I shouldn’t be writing this review: after all, Mistero! is a play in Italian (although with English summaries provided in the programme), a language which I categorically do not speak. I should also provide the caveat that any details of what may have been going on onstage I provide in this review are, at best, speculative, based on those summaries, the consistently good acting and the odd word I recognized and felt inordinately proud of myself about. I am only comforted by the fact that the large majority of those who may want to come and see the play over the course of its run at the BT Studio this week will be in the same position—indeed, may have initially been put off by Mistero!’s feared incomprehensibility. If you, gentle reader, are of this mind, I would very much encourage you to take a chance on this, the third annual iteration of the Oxford Italian Play, regardless.
Instead of a play written as such, Mistero! takes the form of a series of vignettes, each based on a short story by the comparatively little-known Milanese writer Dino Buzzati. These vignettes, which involve various members of the cast and are entirely unconnected to each other in terms of plot, are interspersed with narrations and monologues by a figure representing the author himself (Paolo Torri), who opens the play slumped over his typewriter before being joined, one by one, by his characters. Torri fills the role with personality, with a devilish delight in his eyes when something awful is happening to one of his characters, but really shines in Il critico d’arte, where he plays a progressively drunker and more fulsome critic endeavouring to put words to the work of the avant-garde artist Leo Squittina (which, hilariously, appeared to be played by an upside-down Mondrian).
Awful things happen to the characters in this play more often than not: the sketches range from the very funny, such as Una lettera d’amore, a classic tale of intense endeavour constantly interrupted by an escalating series of visitors and phone calls made golden by its absurd conclusion and by Monia Stefanelli’s vast and impressive library of exactly the kind of voices you do not want to hear droning down a telephone at you; to the chilling revelations of Incontro notturno and of Il mantello (the latter making use of one of the few notable moments of lighting direction in the play, which on the whole was lit effectively but not eye-catchingly); to, finally, Sette Piani (Seven Floors), the show’s last sketch.
This is a Kafkaesque tale of uncontrollable bureaucratic forces ruining a life, but it’s also an interesting exploration of a sort of placebo effect: as the synopsis asks: “Is Giuseppe ill because he is moved to the lower floors, or is he moved to the lower floors because he is ill?”. As well as its fascinating plot, this vignette is notable for the starring role played by Benjamin Ashton, who throughout the play provides some of its best pure acting—especially good is his turn as a ‘ugly and lonely child’, complete with rolled-up trousers, in Povero bambino. As Giuseppe Corte, Sette Piani’s protagonist, Ashton provides an excellent portrait of degradation—from confidence and good health to something entirely other. No matter whether comedy or tragedy was each particular sketch’s tone, however, there was always a darkness present, a pessimism that perhaps comes with the close marriage of journalistic realism (Buzzati worked as a journalist all his life) and the ever-so-slightly fantastic and surreal.
I came away from Mistero! wishing that I spoke Italian—it would unquestionably have been a richer and more interesting experience had I known what the characters were saying, and the Italian speakers in the audience certainly seemed to be having a good time—but absolutely not feeling like I had gotten nothing from it without that fluency. By its clear, accessible acting alone, Mistero! makes intelligible a foreign tongue.
