ROME LETTE ,R
MORAVIA AND THE THEATER
After the success of his first novel,
Gli Indifferenti (The In–
different Ones)
Alberto Moravia-at that time barely twenty-insisted
that he wanted to write a tragedy. He was not to write it until twenty–
eight years later, taking his plot from the story of Beatrice Cenci. But the
desire to write plays was not simply a need to prove himself in a different
genre; it was a desire for maturity and completeness, a desire to illustrate
the necessity of human action directly, presenting the actions themselves
in their objective logic without the intermediary of that
deus ex machina,
the narrator. The narrator in fact does not reason out the actions of his
characters: he invents them, leaving their credibility to the suggestive
power of the invention itself, while the dramatist must account for his
inventions to his audience and justify their necessity in terms of logic.
Moravia's first work in the theater, in 1947, an adaptation of
The
Indifferent Ones,
was nothing more than a theatrical translation of the
novel. The comedy,
La Mascherata
(directed by Georgio Strehe1er at
the Little Theatre in Milan) , was also adapted from a novel, but it was
in many ways an original play, not a simple adaptation.
The novel,
La Mascherata (The Carnival),
was published in 1941,
and was immediately banned by the Fascists. They saw in it not only
a satire of Fascism, but a
roman
a
clef
dealing with the love affair of
Mussolini and Clara Petacci (of which Moravia was in fact totally ig–
norant) .
If
the novel did not please the Fascists, neither did it please
the anti-Fascists. It was a kind of romantic fantasy on the failure in love
of a dictator of a vaguely Latin American country, complicated by the
story of a tragicomic conspiracy organized by policemen who are at the
same time conspirators and by conspirators who are at the same time
policemen. At the end, the police-conspirators undo the conspirators–
police, and the only victim is a sincere conspirator who really wants to
free his country from tyranny but succeeds only in killing the dictator's
mistress and finally in getting himself killed, all adding up to the further
glory of the Chief of Police who organized the whole affair.
The book certainly alluded to Fascism, but, so to speak, without
touching it: it was not written to hurt or to please either one side or
