Edinburgh Fringe 2025

Mussolini

Tom Corradini Teatro

Genre: Biographical Drama, Historical, Theatrical Clown

Venue: C Arts

Festival: Edinburgh Fringe

Low Down

Review

Benito Mussolini has often been portrayed as a comic-opera figure but never, as far as I am aware, as an outright clown. Tom Corradini’s Mussolini is a portrait of the dictator as a mime-artist. He presents the Duce as a craftsman in love with his art, the art of crowd manipulation. Corradini, it appears, is playing a clown playing Mussolini and as he kisses an imaginary Hitler, chomps through a banana and belts out Neapolitan love-songs it can sometimes seem as though the clown has forgotten the role he is meant to be acting, so absorbed has he become in the technicalities of his craft. The show begins at the end, as it were. 24 July 1943: the day of Mussolini’s removal from office. The Duce remains in his study to vent the frustrations and disappointments of his now terminated career. We are treated to his view of life, his view of politics and his view of human nature. Besides the absurdity, the tone is one of wistfulness and resentment. We might even begin to feel sorry for the self-professing “good dictator”.

First and foremost, Corradini looks like the Duce. Not only does he share Mussolini’s body type, strong features and bald head, but he reproduces the dictator’s mannerisms with mimetic exactitude. His performance is as studied and technical as that of Mussolini himself. We might assume that Corradini has spent many hours in front of a mirror, just as Mussolini may have done, perfecting that pout, that fierceness in the eyes, that slight raise of the chin. Corradini mimics the noise of a telex machine, a gruesome fight with an imaginary Roosevelt and a phone call with Hitler during which he fails to get a word in edgeways. Each of these tricks is brilliantly executed and very funny indeed. In fact, it is almost as though we in the audience are sitting on the other side of Mussolini’s bathroom mirror, watching him fool around in front of his own reflection as he practises his gestures and gives voice to his internal monologue.

Corradini knows his stuff. He knows his history and he knows his languages: at least four, in fact – just like Mussolini – and he speaks at least three of them here. The first section of his show is based on Gustave Le Bon’s “The Psychology of Crowds”, one of Mussolini’s chief inspirations. The Duce outlines Le Bon’s “seven skills to conquer a crowd”. The demagogue, it seems, must appeal to the animal and religious parts of man, to the soul and to the stomach. Yet Mussolini claims that it was as a child that he first learned how to turn an audience, when he was forced to attend socialist party meetings with his father. Mussolini is partly his bullying political father and partly his artistic teacher mother. In the end, he synthesises both influences: politics becomes his art. “I wanted to be a musician, just as Hitler wanted to be an artist,” he claims, “but in the end we worked on the highest art: moulding people”.

Much of the show focuses on a character who is never present on stage: Adolf Hitler. His only appearance is as a terrifying hand puppet which Corradini operates from behind, in another display of his technical brilliance. Mussolini has a kind of “superiority complex” that makes it difficult for him to come to terms with his relationship with Hitler. He sees the world in terms of lions and sheep, but when he has to put up with Hitler’s teases, beg Hitler to help him invade Greece, and introduce Hitler’s antisemitic legislation that will imperil his own Jewish mistress, what does that make the Duce? A sheep? Mussolini, on the other hand, regards himself as the first dictator, the good dictator, and Hitler as the man who stole his act and gave fascism a bad name. Mussolini is the great performer while Hitler “sounds like a shrieking monkey”. But Hitler conquers Europe and what does Mussolini manage to grab? Albania. “Hitler,” he regrets, “will always be a mythological figure – a god – while the world will consider me a pathetic little clown.”

The staging – a table, a chair and a few personal objects – is basic but sufficient. The writing is effective but at times secondary to the mime act which consists mainly of noises and expressions. The script has also been abridged. This means that Corradini’s performance can at times appear rushed. For example, I am not sure he had time to get to the sixth or seventh of “the skills to conquer a crowd”, or to read the letters from Churchill which sat on a music stand. However, these cuts did not significantly damage the show. Any longer would have been too long.

Mussolini may not be to everyone’s taste. Indeed, some might find it tasteless, as just a great deal of clowning around that makes light of a serious subject. Other viewers may well demand more in the way of judgement, but this would be too obvious and frankly boring. Corradini’s is not a political analysis, but a psychological one. He neither condemns nor valorises Mussolini. Instead, he tries to let him speak for himself and leaves it to us to decide whether we are convinced. By the end of the show, the audience might be tempted to feel some sympathy for the ex-dictator. Forget that he raped his lovers, murdered his opponents and threw Jews and Africans into concentration camps, Mussolini was, apparently, just a mummy’s boy, “a regular Italian male” who loved his wine, women and song: “I’ve been a dictator but a good one”. Do we really believe this, though? – or are we just the latest crowd to fall prey to his dangerous words?

Published August 16, 2025 by Tom Allen