Shit Show: Why actors shout “Merda!” three times before curtain up
My experience performing in local theatre was pretty rote compared to many people I know, but even on that grassroots level, I know that there are few experiences more exciting and terrifying than the hour before your first performance.
For those of you who haven’t had this particular joy, let’s get one thing clear: any actor who has ever stepped foot on stage in anger knows that the very last thing you feel before the show begins is ready. You are freaking the fuck out about every particular detail.
Your lead can’t get their big monologue that opens Act Two quite right. The prop department dropped the ball, and all the fly-in scenery looks god-awful. Even if you can pull all this off, you’re suddenly convinced that the show itself is terrible, and even if you can pull it off, why would you want to?
What makes it all worse is that the members of your company are more in thrall to theatrical history than you keep shouting shit at the top of their lungs. I mean that literally too, as they pass each other backstage, they’re yelling “Merda! Merda! Merda!” or “Tanta Merda!” at each other while flicking through their scripts as if they haven’t been doing exactly that for months now, and for the life of you, you can’t work out why. The truth is that this is a tradition that dates back to the Middle Ages.
The fact that this means the tradition doesn’t date back to the very beginning of the theatrical tradition is a sign of the medium’s vast history, but instead, a few centuries after a theatrical culture was established all over Europe.
Specifically (as you can see from the language), this is something that comes from Italian theatre. Theatre was a pastime enjoyed by people of all classes. While any audience was a good one, if you wanted to actually develop, rather than just maintain the course, you wanted to attract wealthy audience members and impress them so much that they would become your patrons.
Wealthy audience members wouldn’t arrive at theatres on foot, the way that working-class members of the audience would. No, they would arrive on horseback or, even better, via a horse-drawn carriage. Those horses would then be standing around during the show, doing what horses do when left to their own devices for a while and leaving, well, tanta merda! That is, if you had the right calibre of audience turning up that night. After all, lots of manure meant that lots of wealthy patrons were turning up.
Today, the saying has done what pretty much all theatrical traditions do and evolved in the years since. It now more broadly means a way for actors to wish each other the best for the show. Which essentially means that it’s been folded into one of the most theatrical traditions of all.
Say the words “good luck” to someone at your fucking peril.