“Mussolini the Critic” explores the dictator’s engagement with his preferred contemporary dramatists: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Luigi Pirandello, and George Bernard Shaw. Moving from a recounting of il Duce’s personal acquaintance with the writers into a discussion of how he interpreted their works (drawing on his writings and interviews and various third-party testimonies), the chapter identifies the theatrical traditions that inspired the dictator and shaped his thinking, and works through the philosophical elements that united the authors and drew Mussolini to them: Nietzschean exaltations of the will to power; the command of word and ritual in moving the modern masses; the celebration of intuitive action; and, most surprisingly, a fascination for heroic, rebellious women. The chapter concludes with reflections on fascism’s reputed “aesthetic pluralism,” suggesting that the ideological affinities in such apparently different authors counters the reigning postulate that this perceived pluralism is the result of an ideological vacuity in fascist thought.

Chapter 4, “Mussolini the Censor,” discusses his role in the theatrical censorship process, which he centralized in 1931 and presided over, directly and indirectly, for the decade that followed. It gives ample space to previously unexplored archival documents, including scripts as sent to and then modified by the censor, Leopoldo Zurlo, and to this official’s 1952 memoir. Reconstructing the management of hot-button themes and authors both native and foreign, unknown and famous (like Bernard Shaw, Pirandello, and the then emerging Vitaliano Brancati), the analysis covers the rules and their exceptions, censorship as it was stipulated on paper and what it looked like in actual practice. Juxtaposing these stories and analyses with statistical evidence, the chapter provides a comprehensive picture of the dictatorship’s theatre censorship that enables comparison – of fascism to the periods that came before and after, and of Italy to the world beyond its borders. The emerging image is of a process less unique and draconian but perhaps more unsettling than often imagined.

‘Decadent theatre’ is not an established genre within British theatre studies. Barring Wilde’s Salomé, Maeterlinck’s Symbolist theatre had little impact on the British stage, though it strongly influenced the Irish theatre. Frequently applied to Ibsen as a term of abuse, ‘Decadent’ denoted plays that challenged social and moral conventions. Sensuality and sexual temptation became a staple within purportedly moral plays, and ‘fallen woman plays’ like Bella Donna (1911) and ‘toga dramas’ like The Sign of the Cross (1894–5) made box office gold. British avant-garde theatre was shaped by Bernard Shaw, who blended realism and theatrical extravagance into an alternative form of Decadent theatre. Shavian realism and social critique were key to the development of the British theatrical avant-garde, and ‘Decadent’ theatre thus took on different forms from on the Continent. The verbally extravagant, self-consciously theatrical comedies of Oscar Wilde produced one brand, whose legacy was the poised black comedies of Noël Coward and Joe Orton. Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell, by contrast, pushed unrepentant realism to the point of awakening critics’ lurid imaginations.