<i>L’imperatrice della Luna: L’Avventuriero (The Rover)</i>

At the beginning of act 5 of Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677), Florinda’s chastity hangs in the balance. Trapped in the apartments of the vengeful fool, Blunt, her identity unknown, she is variously threatened with rape by exiled “cavaliers” Frederick, Blunt, Willmore, and even, it appears, her suitor, Belvile, who cannot find a way to “bring her off.” Her own brother wins the opportunity by lot drawn between the men to ravage the unknown lady but is called away. Now that Florinda’s true identity as a lady of quality and Belvile’s beloved can be revealed, Willmore begs her pardon, to which she answers, “The Friend to Belvile may command me any thing.”It is a measure of the considered approach shown by its creatives and the expressive acting of the cast in Teatro Due’s production that this was the standout scene it should be in Behn’s dark, dirty early play. In a cavernous auditorium—the audience in raked rows on either side of a long stage that could serve either as a street for dueling, a garden for tryst, or a cavernous bedchamber—everyone held their breath as Florinda, through gritted teeth, delivered her reluctant lines of submission. We all knew that—all other cards played—there was no option but this dreadful revelation of just what kind of bargain she has to settle for. The choice to encase her in a wide-hooped long skirt, contrasting with her sister Hellena’s pink mini and breeches, confirms the sense that Florinda has nowhere to run, no moves to play, and that the sexual freedoms of Naples in carnival only makes her more vulnerable. Not that this full costume, full text, stylish and stylized, production suggested that we can watch these scenes from a safe-present distance. On display here, clear enough, is the grim reality of male gangs who groom and abuse, passing between them, young girls. And equally the inadequate responses of state services, policing, and governments when reported.L’Avventuriero, in a new translation into Italian by Luca Scarlini and directed by Giacomo Giuntini, ran from 12 to 30 March 2025 at Fondazione Teatro Due in the city of Parma. It was a national premiere of Aphra Behn’s comedy.The venue at Viale Basetti was first converted into public baths in the early twentieth century, with a theatre and public rooms added in the 1930s; a full restoration and conversion was begun in 2002 and completed in 2011. A slate of activities around the 2025 production of Behn’s play supported better knowledge of the author and her works among students, scholars, and members of the public alongside cast and creatives of the company: group readings of two of her shorter fictions, Oroonoko (1688) and The History of the Nun, or the Fair Vow Breaker (1689)—works that confirm the sense that Behn lived close to the violence of her times and the impossible choices faced by those stripped of power.The Fondazione Teatro and the University of Parma collaborated to run a two-day conference, “Aphra Behn tra pagina e Teatro” (Aphra Behn from Page to Stage) on 20 and 21 March with the support of the University of Oxford; the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, University of Cambridge; Lucy Cavendish College, Università degli Studi della Tuscia; Dipartimento di Studi Linguistico-Letterari, Storico-Filosofici e Giuridici; American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; and the Women’s Studies Group. The conference was organized under the creative leadership of Professor Diego Saglia of the University of Parma with the support of a committee, with members Ros Ballaster, Paola Donati, Giacomo Giuntini, Francesca Saggini, Diego Saglia, and Luca Scarlini.Our vision was to offer papers with simultaneous translation between Italian and English introducing the life, works, and afterlife of Aphra Behn. Papers introduced her life and writing career (Janet Todd), her versatility across genres as a writer of prose fiction with a global reach and perspective (Ros Ballaster), and her position as a playwright of enormous success seeing more plays into production in her lifetime than her prolific Poet Laureate contemporary John Dryden (Diego Saglia). Maria Chiara Barbieri fleshed out the contexts of a period when women first took female parts. Masolino D’Amico described the libertine aesthetics and ethics she shared—and matched—with her close poetic contemporaries. We heard too from Professor Elaine Hobby about the editorial findings of the new edition of The Rover for the complete works from Cambridge University. Another way of making visible and accessible this most accomplished of artists was described by Francesca Saggini. She told us about the competition launched by the Canterbury Commemoration Society (of Behn’s home town) for a new statue of Aphra Behn, the successful design by sculptor Christine Charlesworth, the making process of the statue, and its unveiling in Canterbury city on 24 February 2025. Liliana Rampello spoke in her paper of the rare affinities modernists Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf found with Aphra’s experimentalism. Luca Scarlini, translator of the play, and performance artist, playwright, and storyteller, concluded proceedings with an account of Behn’s afterlife in fiction, speculative and futuristic.Astraea’s star surely shone through brightest in the performance that conference goers attended on the evening of 20 March 2025. The barest grasp of Italian but a sound knowledge of the play afforded me the opportunity to attend to the striking visuality, the importance of gesture and uncomfortable intimacy between men and women of different classes and ethics onstage and between performers and audience. There was something exhilarating about seeing a play set in Italy—Behn relocated Thomas Killigrew’s interminable 1654 comedy Thomaso from Madrid to Naples—in an Italian theatre translated and communicated by Italian artists. This was an edgy carnival spirit. If, as we have seen, Florinda’s embattled confusion was a still enclosed marker throughout the play, a febrile Hellena and a world-weary late-to-love Angellica equally moved our compassion in their attempts to hold Willmore, well played as a man whose appetites consistently overcome his modicum of sense and loyalty. Here was a production to rival the triumphs at the Swan Theatre directed by John Barton in 1986 and Loveday Ingram in 2016. It is only a heartbreak, for Behn and her admirers, that the themes of exploitation, hypocrisy, and cruelty are no less urgent, no less unresolved as they were in 1677.

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