Summer Holiday Fever

“The world is the book from which I have learned the most,” wrote Carlo Goldoni, one of the greatest masters of Italian drama. And in his work, this world sparkles and bursts forth with unprecedented energy from people, their conversations, and everyday situations. By creating simple, authentic, convincing, and easily understandable stories, Goldoni portrays human relationships from the inside, managing to unfold them in all their nuances — transforming them into a metaphor for the world itself. In the 18th century, a time of vague prospects for the future and permeated by inexplicable cruelty, when there was a sense that Europe was about to reach a turning point that would forever change the face of society, Goldoni is profoundly human, capable of winning people over with love and warmth even when he is fiercely criticizing them. Surpassing his time with his work, the playwright captured the condition of modern man and the concerns that torment him, highlighting the importance of the character of a woman who questioned her entrenched traditional role in society — this mastery is most brilliantly revealed in the magnificent “The Villeggiatura Trilogy” (also translated as “The Holiday  Trilogy”) consisting of three works: “The Frenzied Yearnings for the Holiday”, “Holiday Adventures,” and “The Return from the Holiday.”

This autumn, director Gabrielė Tuminaitė will present the first part of the trilogy, "Summer Vacation Fever", at the Vilnius Small Theater. Livorno. The characters are frantically preparing to leave for their summer villas in the countryside, while in the foreground is Leonardo’s jealousy of his fiancée Giacinta, whom the young Guglielmo is also courting. In their desperate rush, they disregard both financial and moral norms, consumed by a mania of vanity. They hope that once they’ve left for the villas, in that magical “elsewhere,” they will find fulfillment as people, and the problems they’re fleeing from will resolve themselves. But it soon becomes clear that the problem lies much deeper—in a complete inability to manage their lives, which are hurtling headlong toward ruin. As the characters constantly oscillate between anxiety, jealousy, outbursts of anger, and irritation, the work’s pace accelerates relentlessly, the tension rising to the point of madness, as if possessed by this mass exodus; they leave their cluttered, ransacked, and ravaged home-theater and rush off elsewhere, to where it is “better,” hoping to become what has been promised to them: to be more talented, more beautiful, and more recognized.

Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793) was a Venetian playwright and director who wrote more than 150 plays. The playwright was determined to undertake what seemed at the time an impossible mission—to create an Italian theater that would resonate throughout Europe and become accessible to everyone. Beginning his career during the twilight of commedia dell’arte, he removed the actors’ masks and emphasized the importance of the text, thereby bringing written drama back to the stage. Undervalued in his own time, having left Italy and ultimately falling into complete poverty, regarded merely as the author of mediocre comedies, he experienced a renaissance in the 20th century when his works began to be staged one after another by the great masters of Italian theater direction—Luchino. Visconti, Giorgio Strehler, Luca Ronconi, and others—and skeptical theater directors had to admit that the artist, who created his works a couple of centuries ago, is more relevant than ever. Today, Carlo Goldoni’s work has established itself among the works of the world’s greatest playwrights, and the author himself is recognized by Italians as the “Galileo of modern literature.”

“The Villeggiatura Trilogy” is a monumental work not only because of its mathematically refined dramaturgy, but above all because of its poetic and literary maturity and the almost cinematic precision it achieves. A few years ago, the trilogy made it onto the list of the 101 best and most influential plays in the world, compiled by the authoritative publisher and editor Michael Billington and published in “The Guardian.”

Over the coming year, the Vilnius Small Theater, together with its partners, will present the entire trilogy to audiences. Full of surprises it will be staged as three separate productions.