Benign homage to the beauty of the human

A scrambling audience fought its way in to take a seat in Sir Temi Zammit Hall at the University of Malta where Roberto Benigni, now Dr Benigni, was to perform in a literary evening on Dante alongside eminent Dante scholar, Prof. Robert Hollander from Princeton University, described by Benigni himself as the person who knows most about Dante in the whole world.

Benigni walked in after an energetic introduction by Gloria Lauri-Lucente and a viewing of a montage of clips from various films of his. Stage centred, with open arms and a translucent smile, Benigni took on the position that best personifies him: an open, life-loving, outward-reaching actor, or, rather than actor, person who manages to transmit those qualities even in his acting. "Inħobbkom (I love you)," he repeated in Maltese, affectionately warming up the audience with his use of the language. "I send you back the love you send me centiplied," he joked reverting back to Italian.

His playfulness moved between different realms of the comic: the sexual as well as the scholarly. As he himself stressed, however, he was playing, not joking. I wonder if he was pointing to much of the press coverage surrounding his visit this week that seems to have missed this important distinction. He does not take life as a joke; rather he plays with the nuances and juxtapositions of the emotions that life evokes, a theme that is recurrent in his work.

His dialogue with Prof. Hollander used Benigni's freshly bestowed honoris causa to create a comic structure where the professor was testing the worthiness of the student in his knowledge of Dante. While allowing for the audience to learn some light-hearted trivialities about Dante, it provided a comic background to the more serious, as well as beautiful, theme of their conversation drawn from "the greatest poem of humanity", Dante's Divine Comedy: in invoking beauty, true freedom is to be found. This theme, crafted through the poetic images he created, made Dante the visionary that Benigni truly believed him to be. "I'd like to know what he took," he joked; "today we take ecstasy, but I'd like to know what Dante ate to have such an imagination".

Always playful, yet toned down from his comic exuberance, Benigni again took solo stage to give a most detailed commentary of the last canto from Paradiso (Heaven). He moved through the canto, describing the emotions and bewilderment he felt in the face of its nuances at different stages in life. The complexities of the contradictions it implied that are inherent in religious belief made it awe-inspiring to him. He took on a child's energy as he pointed to the ease with which children believe, and the joy he felt as a child to read his name in the poem that described the Madonna as "benign".

He then moved to imitate child speak, showing us the child we become in the face of God as depicted in the poem. It was with awe that he showed us what Dante made him see: he performed the all-sightedness of God who sees Caesar, and the horse he rode on, and the nail of the horse's shoe, and the grass on which this horse trod, and such detail at every instance of space and time; he performed the eternal fixation that God has with Our Lady, showing us that from the beginning of time God saw the beauty of this woman from whom he wanted to be made but in trepidation waited to ask her for this possibility, giving her the freedom to choose even though he knew that "women sometimes say no".

The beauty of the images woven out of the contradictions of faith were portrayed alongside the love for life, the overview of life that the view from Heaven allowed, as well as the realisation that when we are born, the only thing we have is life.

It was on these foundations that he ended "the trivialities through which we show our affection to each other", to move to "the fact of the poem", rendering its musicality to an audience whose experience of recited Dante cannot be a common occurrence.

Thus, through his homage to Dante, Benigni paid homage to the Madonna, to life, and to the beauty of the human.