Three Plays Read Online

(Milan, 1973).

Texts contained in this volume are indicated as follows:

The ‘Meridiani’ volume of Saggi e interventi, ed. Ferdinando Taviani (Milan, 2008), gives the 1908 text of Humourism (L’umorismo). Pirandello’s thought, however, is clearer in the revised text of 1920 which is found in volume vi of the older Mondadori edition of Pirandello, Saggi, poesie, scritti varii, ed. Manlio Lo Vecchio-Musti (Milan, 1960), denoted here by the abbreviation SP.

All translations are my own.

INTRODUCTION

ON 10 May 1921, at the Teatro Valle in Rome, the first performance of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author provoked a famous theatrical brawl. The actors had to contend with shouting, whistling, and cries of ‘madhouse’; counter-protests by the author’s supporters led to scuffles in the street; Pirandello and his daughter Lietta were showered with insults and small coins as they sought a taxi to take them safely home. Four months later, with an audience who had been prepared both by the scandal and by publication, Six Characters received a better reception in Milan, and in 1923 Georges Pitoëff’s imaginative Paris production set off a wave of enthusiasm that saw the play performed in almost every European capital and as far afield as New York, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo. In 1922 a similar but more immediate success greeted Ruggero Ruggeri’s masterly interpretation of Henry IV.

Both plays are now established as seminal classics of the modern stage and there is no good reason to challenge the orthodoxy that sees them as Pirandello’s most characteristic and influential achievements. But we should not, on this account, regard what came before Six Characters as mere apprenticeship or dismiss what came after Henry IV as a decline. Our vision of the two plays becomes distorted if they are detached from the broader context of Pirandello’s long literary career, and the significance of that career cannot be understood solely in terms of its most notable successes.

The author who enjoyed such a sudden international breakthrough was, in fact, already in his mid-fifties and anything but a newcomer to the Italian literary scene. He had started out as a poet, but soon turned to novels and short stories, initially marked by an adherence to the school of Sicilian naturalism (verismo) as represented by Federico De Roberto, Luigi Capuana, and, above all, Giovanni Verga. This period culminates with The Old and the Young (I vecchi e i giovani, first part 1909, completed 1913), a long novel centred on the period between 1892 and 1894 and structured around the two poles of Rome, where the political class is mired in a grave banking scandal, and Sicily, shaken by the doomed peasant rebellion of the fasci siciliani. The portrayal of Sicilian society resembles that of such better-known novels as De Roberto’s The Viceroys (1894) or Lampedusa’s The Leopard (1958), as it traces the rapid decline of Garibaldian idealism, the compromises and collusion that link old aristocracy to raw and ruthless bourgeoisie, and the failure of the new unified Italy to provide any political solution for the stunted development, grinding poverty, and archaic social structures of the island. The author himself seems to stand behind Don Cosmo Laurentano’s disenchanted withdrawal from political engagement:

One thing only is sad, my friends: to have understood the game … I mean the game of that playful devil that each of us has within and who amuses himself by representing to us, outside, as reality, what a moment later he will reveal as our own illusion … Wear yourselves out and torment yourselves, without thinking that all this will come to no conclusion. (RO ii. 509–10)

The Old and the Young was already something of a throwback by the time it started to appear. Five years earlier Pirandello had published The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904) which is usually considered as announcing the new direction of his work. Here Pirandello abandons Sicily for a setting which is announced as Liguria but presented without any marked regional features. The story of the eponymous narrator emerges as a philosophical fable in a way that justifies Leonardo Sciascia’s bracketing of Pirandello with Kafka and Borges.1 Trapped in a loveless marriage, devoid of any real vocation, and leading a life that is completely beyond his control, Mattia Pascal is offered what appears to be a fresh start when a drowned corpse is officially identified and buried as his. Assuming a new identity under the invented name of Adriano Meis, he at first experiences a euphoric feeling of freedom and envisages honest and constructive relations with his fellow men. But the illusion is short-lived: freedom becomes isolation, for the lie on which the new self is based makes it impossible for him to participate in the conventions and institutions to which human relations inevitably give rise. A new marriage is out of the question in a situation where he cannot even buy a dog. Thus he will eventually suppress Adriano Meis through a faked suicide and ‘die’ for a second time. But a return to the old false relations is now impossible. Rather than disturb his supposed widow and her new husband, he withdraws to the decayed municipal library, significantly housed in a deconsecrated church, to write his autobiography.

In The Late Mattia Pascal, as in the later novel One, No One, One Hundred Thousand (1926), we find many of the themes that will recur in the plays. Mattia, for all his extraordinary adventures, is a twentieth-century Everyman, plagued by the impossibility of possessing a stable identity, tormented by the ‘sad privilege’ of consciousness, by a ‘feeling of life’ that he mistakes for knowledge of it, condemned, after the failure of the ‘great lanterns’ of religions and ideologies, to walk by the light of his own little lamp which reveals nothing but the darkness around him (RO i. 484–8). This is the ‘lanternosophy’ expounded in the novel by the spiritualist philosopher Paleari who finds in the theatre another metaphor for the absurdity of life in a purposeless post-Copernican world. He imagines a Sophoclean drama like Elektra being performed in a puppet theatre when suddenly a hole appears in the painted paper sky above the stage:

Orestes would still be intent upon revenge, yet in the very moment when he is about to accomplish it with passionate intensity, his eyes would look up there, to that rent in the sky, through which all kinds of evil influences penetrate down to the stage, and his arm would fail him. Orestes, in short, would become Hamlet. Believe me, there lies all the difference between ancient and modern tragedy: a hole in a paper sky.