The count Franz Pocci comes back on Earth to see Munich, his good old city, once again. There, he encounters a series of characters that, each in their own way, prove the missteps of the Soviet Republic: the Demagogue–under the features of revolutionary Kurt Eisner; Death; the Jew and the Devil; then Kasperl and the Münchner Kindl (“Munich child”, figure inspired by the coat of arms of the city). At the end, a young war invalid arrives and gathers around him university students, workers: an exhilarated crowd, who, fulfilling the count’s wish, begins to awaken “the ancient force of the German people” (“die alte deutsche Volkeskraft”).

Adults

Pocci Ernst

Germany

Landshut

Printed

Bavaria

Revolution

People and history

Revenant

Tramway

Communism

Conservatism

Red flag

Faust

Anti-Semitism

Catholicism

Money

Modernity

Politics

Spartacists

Nationalism

Polemical

Satirical

German

Ein Puppenspiel aus der Nachkriegszeit

Franz von Pocci

Demagogue

Death

Devil

Kasperl

Münchner Kindl

War invalid

Blacksmith

Student

People

Apparition

Worker

Instrumental tune

Off-stage voice

Prologue

Light effects

Philosophical dialogue

Caricature

Thunderbolt

Defecation on stage

Brawl

Versified passages

Word for another

Parody of formal language

Nachtschatten

Night shadows

After performing a traditional guarattelle show, the puppeteer and his Pulcinella think they won’t have anything to eat as the audience left without paying. They both decide to leave Naples for France. When they arrive at court, the King carefully examines Pulcinella with a magnifying glass, and finds him too poor, so drives him away. Pulcinella beats the King with a stick and the guards come to arrest him. The puppet escapes from the puppet booth with the Puppeteer, who explains that if the puppet wants to eat, he must “change his face”.
The Puppeteer then turns Pulcinella into Polichinelle, giving him new, luxurious clothes decorated with ribbons and little bells, two bumps (one on the belly and the other on the back) and a white mask to hide his black half-mask. Thus transformed, Pulcinella moves and speaks far more slowly, but his new lazzi with a cock amuse the King greatly. The puppet and the Puppeteer are able to eat a big plate of pasta in front of the puppet booth and go to sleep with a full belly. Woken by the Marseillaise, they enter the puppet booth, believing a party is going on. On stage, in front of a guillotine, Robespierre and Danton debate whether the King should be tried. After cutting off the heads of Danton and the King, Robespierre also wants to kill Polichinelle, who is friends with the King. First, he cuts off one bump, and then the other, and finally the white mask. Polichinelle, who has now gone back to being “Pulcinella the revolutionary”, cuts off Robespierre’s head and then, like Napoleon Bonparte, proclaims himself emperor and uses a stick to beat, one after the other, the emperor of Austria and the Pope who has come to crown him. He shows his emperor’s crown to the Puppeteer: it means he’ll be able to eat for 200 years. The Puppeteer comes out of the booth for a last monologue at the end of which he dons the black half-mask and proclaims himself to be Pulcinella.

Glove-puppet

Actor and puppet

All audiences

Leone Bruno

Italy

Naples

Hunger

Quest

Poverty

Wealth

Marseillaise

Plurilingualism

Capital executions and executors

French Revolution

Guillotine

Emperor

Comical

Farcical

French

Puppeteer

Pulcinella

Louis XVI

King

Minister

Guard

Polichinelle

Danton

Maximilien de Robespierre

François I d'Autriche

Pie VII

Dialog between a puppet and its puppeteer

Dialect as a social marker

Blow-with-a-stick

Word warping

Building a puppet on sight

Disguised character (false identity)

Monologue

Beheading

Swazzle

National language as a social marker

Destruction of a puppet

Pulcinella et la Révolution française

Pulcinella and the French Revolution