Carlo Ardito
Brief Candle / Stoney Bowes / Confessions of Zeno / Da Ponte’s Last Stand

The action of Brief Candle takes place between 1873 and 1884 in various cities across Europe. The play celebrates the fascinating and all too brief life and achievement of the painter and diarist Marie Bashkirtseff. (Cast 1m, 4f + narrator.)

It is in stark contrast to the unsavoury adventures of Stoney Bowes, the original of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon, so demonised in his own lifetime as to become a byword for ­iniquity in the North of England. Subtitled ‘The Fortune Hunter’, the play is set in London and north-east England in the late 1700s. (Cast 5m, 2f.)

Another historical character is the picaresque hero of the third play in this volume: Da Ponte’s Last Stand explores the autobiographical recollections of Mozart’s famous librettist and is based on Da Ponte’s own un­reliable memoirs. It is set in New York in 1838 with flashbacks to Mozart’s Vienna of 1785, (Cast 9m, 2f.)

Da Ponte’s attitude to life and art was quite unlike that of the eponymous anti-hero of Confessions of Zeno, whose comically tortured mind and final escape from the attentions of a Freudian analyst is in itself an affirmation of the power of survival of the human spirit. The play, set in Trieste before the First World War, is a satire on the then new-fangled idea of psychoanalysis as a cure for smoking! (Cast 8m, 8f, some doubling.)

Carlo Ardito
St James’s Blues / A Bed for the Knight
/ Waiting for the Barbarians

Three comedies for the modern age.

St James’s Blues: The gentlemen on the committee of the Mariners’ Club - the Commodores as they are known - are in a quandary. They discover that they are sitting on some valuable freehold assets in St James’s. But if they decide to cash in on their windfall they will have to open their doors to women members. A gentle satire on the notion of political correctness. (Cast 6m, 2f)

A Bed for the Knight: What happens when the wife of the Home Secretary wakes up one morning to find a Knight of the Realm - not her husband - sleeping peacefully beside her? A true farce and pure bedlam. (Cast 8m, 4f)

Waiting for the Barbarians: The action of this play takes place in imperial Rome, but not necessarily in historical time. For we are all gathered in the market-place and the Barbarians are coming today. A witty comedy about social fears and the enemy within. (Cast 5m, 2f)

“St James’s Blues takes a wry amused look at the sleepy enclosed world of ancient clubs of St James’s ... A Bed for the Knight is set in the world of the Westminster mansion block flat of the Home Secretary ... Waiting for the Barbarians ... reads like a superior Carry On script ... So, though there is not a four-letter word in any of these wry comedies, nor a kitchen sink anywhere in sight, you can savour everywhere the old fashioned virtues of well-constructed scenes and cunningly assembled witty dialogue.”
~ (Peter Roberts, Plays International)