IN PRAISE OF THE VARIETY THEATRE

An artistic credo for the National Theatre of Variety – inspired by F.T. Marinetti, Milan, 1913, and the artistes seen on the Grand Theatre stage:

THE VARIETY THEATRE is absolutely practical, because it distracts, amuses and educates the public with comic effects and imaginative astonishment

THE VARIETY THEATRE has only one reason for existing or triumphing: incessantly to present new art and entertainment

THE VARIETY THEATRE is a profitable show window for countless inventive forces on stage:

• Powerful caricatures, abysses of the ridiculous, delicious, impalpable ironies, cascades of uncontrollable hilarity, flashes of revealing cynicism
• Plots full of wit, repartee, and conundrums that aerate the intelligence, with laughter and smiles, to flex the nerves
• Profound analogies between humanity, the animal world, the vegetable world, and the mechanical world
• The whole gamut of stupidity, imbecility, blockishness and absurdity, pushing intelligence to the very border of madness

THE VARIETY THEATRE seeks the audience’s collaboration:

• It doesn’t remain inert like a stupid voyeur, but joins noisily in the action, in the singing, in the accompanying of the orchestra, communicating with the artistes in surprising actions and bizarre dialogues
• The actors bicker clownishly with the jugglers, ballerinas, chanteuses, gymnasts and musicians
• Because the audience cooperates in this way with the fantasy on stage, the action develops simultaneously in the boxes and in the pit. It continues at the end of the performance, among the battalions of fans, the honeyed dandies who crowd the stage door to fight over the star turn; double final victory: chic dinner and bed...

THE VARIETY THEATRE is a school of cerebral subtlety, complication and synthesis:

• By reason of its clowns, conjurers, thought-readers, comedians and dancers
• It is a school one can recommend to young people, because it explains in an incisive, anti-academic, primitive and rapid manner the most mysterious problems and the most complicated political events
• It explains and luminously illustrates the laws of life
• It destroys the Solemn, the Sacred, the Serious, the Sublime of Art – with a capital A

“The Variety stage is the sole remaining link connecting us with that stupendous achievement of the sixteenth century known as the Commedia dell'Arte. It is not the Commedia but it has certain marked resemblances to it and when the ‘legitimate theatre’ sees distinguished players stepping on to the Music Hall stage, it has, far from matter for complaint, the best cause for self congratulation and for hope. The Variety Theatre, cherishing as it does so much creative talent of a somewhat exaggerated order, is very much alive”
Edward Gordon Craig, The Mask, 1912

“Variety is the essential theatre”

F.T.Marinetti, In Praise of the Variety Theatre, 1913

Variety is a dramatic form which is linked on the one hand with theatrical - as opposed to literary - traditions, and on the other with the tastes of the people.
- Vsevolod Meyerhold, The Fairground Booth, 1915