In his research work Claudio Longhi has been
mainly focused on an historical and theoretical study of the
theater of the twentieth century, investigating in particular: the
transition from the civilization of the “great actor” to that kind
of theatre based on the role of the director; the birth, the zenith
and the crisis of the totalizing instances of “magistralis
directing”, the dynamics of evolution of contemporary dramatic
language (analyzed in particular in its relations with the
narrative codes and the film syntax), the various flourishing of
theatrical theories that marked the scene of the last century. As
part of its historical surveys of the twentieth-century theater, he
has studied especially the fortune and the different facets of
political theater.
The basis of the theatre research done by
Claudio Longhi is an analysis of the multifaceted and contradictory
development of the twentieth-century drama, read through the
categories of the bachtinian narrative and of the theory of film
editing (see in this respect his volumes The drama of the
twentieth century. Between novel and editing and Between
modern and postmodern. The dramaturgy of the twentieth
century). In a very peculiar situation such as the Italian one,
where the advent of the direction coincided with an unfruitfulness
of the writing for the stage, his first studies on the drama of the
last century led him to address the issue of "directing". After a
first meticulous analysis of Luca Ronconi's theatre (see: The
"Orlando Furioso" by Ariosto-Sanguineti for Luca Ronconi),
his attention has been progressively focusing on strategies for
overcoming the “magistralis directing” and, in the wake of these
studies, he ended up finding in Aldo Trionfo a key to the
understanding of the Italian theater (but not only) at the turn of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In recent years, a careful
reading of the dynamics of “post-directing” led him to a conversion
of interests: in fact his most recent researches have brought him
to overcome, or at least to question, his usual approach to the
“directing language”, to reassess the figure of the actor and his
history. In this perspective, his experiences of collaboration
(still in progress) with the Multimedia Archive of the Italian
Actors (database for which he has drawn the entries: Marisa Fabbri,
Franco Branciaroli and Cesco Baseggio) were determinant. In the
wake of this new direction of studies he created his monography
Marisa Fabbri: a long journey through the “theater of
directing”, an articulated attempt to make an assessment of the
Italian tradition theater of the last sixty years through the
reconstruction of the artistic experience of a great actress who
put herself at the service of the directing scene. Intersecting his
long association to Sanguineti dramaturgy (began in '96 with the
publication of the critical edition of Orlando Furioso. An
Ariosto disguise), the investigation around the experience of a
“militant” actress such as Marisa Fabbri has precipitated in a very
particular attention dedicated to the definition and the
deciphering of the various forms of contemporary political theater.
In Longhi's research work, the study of the theater of the
twentieth century tends to mold itself on the theoretical paradigm
of conflict between modernism and postmodernism, and on a
comparative reading of theater poetics and of the main lines of
contemporary philosophical thought, especially the
poststructuralist and the deconstructionist (see monograph:
Metaphysics and writing for the stage). It should be noted,
finally, that Claudio Longhi research combines a
theoretical-historical approach to the forms of theatrical language
with their practical survey, based on the direct theater experience
of the researcher as a theater director.
