The Stivalaccio Teatro folk theatre company reinterprets one of the most frequently performed plays in early 18th-century Paris: Il muto per spavento pays a great tribute to the Commedia dell’Arte and the quintessentially Italian ability to make a virtue of necessity.

1716. After some fifteen years of forced exile, the Italian Comedians finally return to take centre stage in Parisian theatre. Luigi Riccoboni, stage name Lelio, the company’s leader, surrounds himself with the finest performers from Italy, including, for the first time in France, the Harlequin from Vicenza, Tommaso Visentini (nomen omen), ready to replace the late and beloved Evaristo Gherardi. But Visentini did not speak French, an unforgivable shortcoming for the capital’s audience, and it is here that Riccoboni’s genius shines through in devising an original plot in which the servant from Bergamo becomes mute… out of fear.
A performance in which playfulness, invention, love, fear and drama intertwine amidst the unchanging grimaces of the masks, and in which the plots become entangled in misunderstandings and slowly unravel between the characters’ fingers.
An original Arlecchino, both for the choice of this unpublished plot and for the desire to bring the Commedia dell’Arte back into the limelight, after at least twenty years of silence, with its ‘repertoire’ of tools of the trade, such as acting, singing, dancing, stage combat, comic antics and improvisation.