LETTER ONE

TWO LETTERS by Tony Nardi
December 16, 2006
Robert Cushman

Tony Nardi is an actor best known to Toronto theatre audiences for his work with Soulpepper, for whom he gave notable performances in A Flea in Her Ear, The Winter's Tale, Miss Julie (Strindberg again) and The Lesson. He is also in great demand on television, often for playing Italians, or anyway Italian-Canadians. His dissatisfaction with the ethnic stereotyping to which he has found himself subject, occasioned the first of his Two Letters, extended solo rants (that's a description, not a judgment) that he has been performing in various spots around town over the past month or two. I saw and heard the second Letter, which is focused more on theatre than on TV, and which arose from a long letter he sent some Toronto theatre critics after a production -- in which he did not appear -- of a Goldoni play he felt both they and the director had misunderstood, largely because of their shared ignorance of the Italian commedia tradition from which it sprung.

It --Nardi's performance, not the Goldoni production -- was quite the firework display. There was plenty in it with which to quibble. It went, in its earlier stages, much too fast, as if the actor were nervous of holding the audience's attention with a script he'd written himself. It kept referring back to friends and advisors -- "ghosts" he called them -- who had obviously figured prominently in the first letter, but who remained a mystery to me. It kept going off on tangents; some of these were explosively enjoyable but at others I found myself putting my attention on hold, trusting it would turn itself back on when Tony returned to his main point. (It did.)

The point itself seemed to amount to a fairly standard actors' complaint to the effect that most directors are not to be trusted, and should not be allowed to come between the actors and the play. This is true, and some of Nardi's recreations of the despairing anecdotes with which actors regale one another are hilarious, but it remained unclear exactly what he intended to do about it. Nor am I sure that he did wisely to pin his whole argument on one production, or that he was correct to speak consistently of "Goldoni" and "commedia dell'arte" as if they were synonymous.

I raised this last point at a question- and-answer section after the show. He continued to disagree, and I confess that he convinced me he knew more about both subjects than I did. In fact, he'd already proved it, not by telling but by showing. The final section of his Letter was a kind of dream sequence in which a teacher of commedia went on trial. Nardi jumped between judge, defendant and other participants, bringing stock characters to dizzying life at a pace that now seemed the product of inspiration rather than panic. It was planned and written, but it had the manic flavour of improvisation. I think it was commedia; it was certainly virtuoso. If he wants to help our theatre and himself -- well, as that other commedia descendant Mr. Punch used to say -- that's the way to do it.

© National Post 2006