Topic 3

The piece lasts for approximately 15 minutes.

This devised piece with four performers is an ensemble in the tradition and style of Commedia Dell'Arte, titled "Time of Death", a comic intrigue relating to the death of a patient while being operated on by Dottore. The tradition is of semi-improvised action around a chosen scenario. The characters matter more than the loose and farcical plot; their comic behaviour matters most.

For the masked characters, the costume, the comic exaggeration of actors' bodies and their actions are essential characteristics to make Commedia Dell'Arte recognisable. This is readily achieved at the first appearance of the Arlecchino character. Although sometimes and perhaps most familiarly portrayed with a harlequin mask, the black mask is also traditional, and the costume can also vary, as it did in early Italian street theatre in which the genre originates. Accordingly, although the costume is not highly attentive to detail, this is in the nature of the form and the characters are all readily identifiable. Isabella is appropriately without a mask, and the addition of a modern phone on which she is conversing with her lover is a comic touch which would also be appropriate to the genre, as the improvisational actors would readily use whatever would bring comedy to the moment. So it is comic to juxtapose traditional costume while talking to the most modern technology carried by nearly everyone today.

The narrative is an episode rather than a complete play, which is in keeping with the tradition. A patient dies on the operating table, comically represented by a pair of feet on a table under a sheet. Arlecchino has been helping Dottore with the operation. Pantalone enters with distinctive gait after the table is cleared and is told the patient has died by an 'accident', for which it appears he will be liable for a lot of money. Some comic dialogue ensues in which none of them seem to know what an appendix is. They decide to cover up the 'accident' as a death from untreatable causes. Isabella appears alone in the next scene, talking comically to her lover on her mobile phone. She wants to find her husband's Will but cannot locate it. In the next scene Pantalone informs Isabella that her husband has died. Her over-dramatic cries end when he suggests she may now be 'loaded' but begin again when he lustfully tries to engage with her across the desk. When he leaves Arlecchino suggests conspiring with her that the 'papers' may be with the body in the morgue. Arlecchino sets off to find them then overhears Dottore wrestling with his conscience about the death, and they agree he should confess to Isabella that he is responsible, who is still searching for the Will. When he does so Isabella thinks to herself greedily about the money; in a split scene with Isabella and Dottore in the background Arlecchino tells Pantalone that Dottore is going to confess his responsibility to Isabella; Pantalone is angry as he will be liable to pay, and comes up with the idea that someone should impersonate the husband to make Isabella believe that the husband has not died. Pantalone tells Arlecchino to take on this role. He appears at Isabella's door as the husband; she faints.

This is farcical and it is evident that this story would need to continue, becoming more entangled and presumably to a comic denouement. The Group does not have to show the continuation of the plot for their devised piece to be complete.