(RO i. 467)

The metaphor of the world as stage is all too familiar, but where Macbeth saw human life as resembling ‘a poor player’, here the tragic protagonist is further reduced to a mere puppet of the kind that Pirandello must often have seen during his Sicilian childhood. The hole in the sky reveals the pitiful illusion of reality within which his action occurs. The central innovation of Pirandello’s theatre will be that it calls into question not only its own power as illusion but also its communicative function as a frame that allows and contains meaning.

In the 1890s Pirandello had renounced the theatre after writing a few plays that failed to reach the stage. In 1910, however, with a difficult financial situation aggravated by the increasing insanity of his wife, he found a welcome new source of income when a fellow Sicilian, the playwright-producer Nino Martoglio, persuaded him to adapt and expand some of his short stories into dialect plays, all of which were later translated into Italian. Many of these, such as Sicilian Limes, The Doctor’s Duty, and The Jar, were one-act affairs, but there were also more substantial works, among them Think it Over, Giacomino (1916) and the pastoral comedy Liolà (1917) which has a vitality and irreverence reminiscent of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. But by 1917 Pirandello was tiring of dialect theatre and his decision to write henceforth in Italian must have been reinforced by the success of two younger contemporary playwrights, Luigi Chiarelli and Rosso di San Secondo, both associated with the current known as ‘the theatre of the grotesque’ which takes its name from the subtitle of Chiarelli’s The Mask and the Face (La maschera e il volto, grottesco in tre atti, 1916). The ‘grotesque’ events of this play involve a husband who, instead of killing his adulterous wife, allows her to escape with her lover while he, having confessed to drowning her, is tried, acquitted, and feted for having acted as an honourable man should do. When the deception is discovered, he is universally reviled and threatened with thirty years in prison as punishment for simulating a crime. By now, however, his wife has returned to him and, in a nicely ironic and symmetrical conclusion, the pair escape (or elope) together. Rosso di San Secondo’s Puppets, What Passion! (1918) presents three stages of passion in characters who, like those of Six Characters, remain nameless. Neither Chiarelli nor Rosso di San Secondo are major innovators, but their metaphors of puppets and masks link bourgeois conventions with the lack of stable or authentic identity in a way that echoes The Late Mattia Pascal and anticipates Pirandello’s major plays.

Right You Are, If You Think You Are (Così è (se vi pare), 1917) is the first of the nine full-length plays in Italian that Pirandello wrote before Six Characters and is probably the most frequently performed. The plot is taken from a short story, Signora Frola and Signor Ponza, Her Son-in-Law (1917; NA iii. 772–81) and presents a mystery of the kind that would normally receive a logical solution in the last act. The survivors of an earthquake—Signor Ponza, his wife, and his mother-in-law Signora Frola—arrive in a small town. There Signora Frola, instead of living with her son-in-law, takes lodgings and has no face-to-face contact with her daughter, though she communicates by letter and by shouting up from the courtyard. Unable to restrain their curiosity, the pillars of the local community demand an explanation from Signor Ponza who tells them that the woman with whom he lives is actually his second wife, his first having died in the earthquake. His mother-in law, he asserts, is suffering from a terrible delusion and believes that her daughter is still alive; it is to preserve this illusion that he keeps his wife away from her. For Signora Frola, however, it is Signor Ponza who is deluded in believing his first wife to be dead, while she and her daughter, in his interest, accept the fiction of a second marriage. Which of these two incompatible versions is true? We receive the answer (which is not one) in the final scene when the veiled wife herself claims to be both Signora Frola’s daughter and the second wife of Signor Ponza. To the objections that she must be one or the other, she asserts: ‘No, gentlemen, I am whoever you think I am’ (MN i. 509).

Pirandello himself described the play as ‘a devilish trick’,2 but there is far more to it than the desire to frustrate conventional expectations with a demonstration of the relativity of truth. The key to what Pirandello is doing lies in the character who is absent from the short story but essential to the play: Lamberto Laudisi. For most of the play Laudisi is a raisonneur figure who speaks for the author and delivers a commentary on the action, deriding the quest for a straightforward solution. But it is he who finally intervenes to drive the plot to its strange unravelling. What this compassionate ironist teaches his audience, both onstage and off, is not some trite doctrine of relativism, but rather the recognition that some truths are better left veiled and that necessary illusions should be respected. Thus Signor Ponza respects what he believes is the delusion of Signora Frola and she protects what she thinks to be his. As for Signora Ponza, the objective truth of whether she is the first or the second wife is ultimately irrelevant since she completes a trinity of love by accepting both roles as ‘the remedy that compassion has found’ for their predicament (MN i. 508). Role-playing is not simply a matter of social conformism or bourgeois hypocrisy; it may also create and reveal whatever identity we have.