Matrici anglosassoni : Guglielmo Giannini e il detective drama italiano

The essay explores the relations between Guglielmo Giannini’s theatre and the explosive growth of detective drama in Fascist Italy. With the adaptation for the Italian stage of three remarkably influential American plays (Broadway, The Thirteenth Chair, The Trial of Mary Dugan), detective drama stormed in the Italian theatrical repertoire eliciting a wide variety of reactions, responses, and imitations. In addition, the xenophobic international policy launched by Fascism, notoriously imposing a foreign setting for Italian thrillers, impinged on the Italian production of crime novels and plays that crowded more and more with foreign (especially English and American) detectives and “exotic” backgrounds. Giannini’s production was deeply affected by this status quo. His plays of the period 1930-1935, from Grattacieli to La sera del sabato, pullulates with English, American, or Italian American characters and locations, all showing the typical traits of a compromise formation and that familiar, precarious balance between realism and domestication.