Giorgio Strehler

Giorgio Strehler (14 August 1921 – 25 December 1997) was an actor, Italian opera and theatre director.

Strehler was born in Barcola, Trieste; His father, Bruno Strehler, was a native of Trieste with family roots in Vienna and died when Giorgio was only three. His maternal grandfather, Olimpio Lovrich, subsequently became his father figure. Olimpio was one of the finest horn players of his day and the impresario of the Teatro Comunale Giuseppe Verdi, Trieste’s Opera House. When he was seven, his grandfather died and he moved to Milan with his mother and grandmother.

As a child, Giorgio was not impressed by theater. He found it “false” and decided it did not have the power to stir one’s emotions as film did. His opinions changed one hot summer night while on his way to the cinema. He noticed a sign advertising the air-conditioning posted by the Odeon Theater. He walked in for some relief from the weather to see a performance of Carlo Goldoni’s Una delle ultime sere di Carnevale being given by a company from Venice. He went every evening for the next few days to see more plays by Goldoni. Newly inspired by the theater, he applied and was accepted to the theater school Accademia dei Filodrammatici.

During the war he went into exile in Switzerland. With Geneva’s Compagnie des Masques he directed the world premiere of Albert Camus’s Caligula. After the war he became a theater critic for Milano Sera but he preferred making theater rather than writing about it. It was at this time that he started the Piccolo Teatro di Milano with Paolo Grassi. It opened on 17 May 1947 in the auditorium of the Broletto Cinema with Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths. A few days later they staged Carlo Goldoni’s long forgotten Arlecchino: Servant of Two Masters commedia dell’arte, which would go on to become the longest running play in Italian theater. In that same year he also directed Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata at La Scala, the first of many opera productions he would direct.

Giorgio Strehler focused on theater that was culturally relevant. He did not want to “pay an abstract homage to culture” or “to offer a mere distraction… passive contemplation”. Instead both Giorgio and Paolo agreed that theater was “a place where people gather to hear statements that they can accept or reject”.

In the 1950s he directed several plays by Bertolt Brecht with whom he would become close friends, sharing political beliefs. In 1956 Brecht attended a production of his The Threepenny Opera. Back in Berlin he wrote “… thank you for the excellent performance of my Threepenny Opera which you have realized with a great director. Fire and freshness, ease and precision distinguish this performance from many others I have seen… it would be a joy and an honor for me if your theater could perform… at the Berliner Ensemble’s Theater… which witnessed the first performance of this work”.

His love for William Shakespeare (Coriolanus, The Tempest, King Lear, Twelfth Night, Macbeth), Luigi Pirandello (Enrico IV), and Anton Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard, Platonov) was unmistakable; but he always returned to Goldoni repeating the same plays decades later. …

Source: Article “Giorgio Strehler” from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.