One central character (the Son) refuses to take part, another (the Mother) insists on an episode (her reunion with the Son) which cannot take place. The whole story is only made available through the conflicting narratives of the Father and the Stepdaughter, as if the plot could never quite break free of its roots in an unwritten novel. Moreover, the two crucial scenes that are acted out—the episode in Madame Pace’s back room and the deaths of the two younger children—are deprived of their proper emotional impact by the incessant discussion as to how they should be staged. At a superficial level, therefore, we might speak of a fictional world, that of the Six Characters, being undermined by constant interventions from the real world, that of the Director and his company. In his stage directions (considerably revised in the light of Pitoëff’s production), Pirandello emphasizes the gap between the two worlds, insisting that the distinction between Characters and Actors be reinforced by all means, including lighting and grouping. All this, however, should be seen as a deliberately provocative way of foregrounding precisely the kind of hard-and-fast oppositions that Six Characters ultimately works to blur, disturb, and challenge. However we choose to define the polarities that govern the play—reality and illusion, truth and fiction, life and art, or, in Tilgherian terms, life and form—we shall find it impossible to align them consistently with the two groups on stage, and it is hardly surprising that directors of the play have often found it difficult to establish appropriately different acting styles for the Actors and the Characters. In his stage directions Pirandello goes so far as to suggest that the Characters should wear light masks indicative of dominant emotions such as remorse, revenge, and scorn, a device that seems dangerously close to the allegorical approach that he rejects and that would surely lead us to expect a highly stylized or artificial manner. But when Actors and Characters alternate to perform the scene, it seems that quite the opposite happens. It is the Actors whose tone and gestures appear too polished to be real while the Characters insist on taking verisimilitude so far that a crucial exchange between Madame Pace and the Stepdaughter is spoken in an inaudible whisper, to the great annoyance of the Actors. Each group has to trespass on the other’s territory in order to fulfil its ambition. The real Actors have a professional interest in occupying the world of fiction; the fictional Characters need to test their truth against the real world. The Characters, we are told in the stage directions, are ‘created realities, changeless constructs of the imagination, and therefore more real and substantial than the Actors with their natural mutability’ (SC, p. 7). But those ‘created realities’ can only exist if the author, in whose imagination they have been ‘born alive’, consents to grant them the illusory life of art: as the Father puts it, ‘What for you is an illusion that has to be created is for us, on the contrary, our only reality’ (SC, p. 48). The paradox, of course, is that the life of art, precisely because it involves pinning characters down in a fixed immutable form, becomes a kind of death. Living human beings, however, are condemned to another sort of death or, to be more accurate, non-existence, in that their sheer mutability, their chronic lack of coherence, denies them any substantial identity.

If we [the Characters] have no reality beyond the illusion, then maybe you also shouldn’t count too much on your own reality, this reality which you breathe and touch in yourself today, because—like yesterday’s—inevitably, it must reveal itself as illusion tomorrow. (SC, p. 50)

Six Characters can be approached from many angles, most of which are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Biographers of Pirandello have read the play as a reflection of the dramatist’s own solitude and sexual anguish after his increasingly insane wife had accused him of incest with his daughter Lietta. Readers who come to it fresh from The Late Mattia Pascal may read it as a metaphysical drama in which the characters who seek an author are representative modern men who no longer have the Christian God to grant them substance and significance in a post-Copernican world. But what counts in the long run is that Pirandello’s profound pessimism about man’s capacity to distinguish between reality and illusion is the essential source of all his innovations and experiments in the theatre. In the two other plays of what we now call the metatheatrical trilogy, Each in His Own Way (1924) and Tonight We Improvise (1930), Pirandello takes his dismantling of stage illusion and dramatic convention even further, breaking down barriers not only between actor and character, but also between the actors and the audience. Even spatial and chronological dimensions are challenged when, in Tonight We Improvise, we are offered the choice between a number of scenes that take place simultaneously in different parts of the theatre. In all this we should not underestimate the strong element of playfulness often verging on self-parody, but the result is to force the spectator into an unprecedented awareness and examination of the complex ways in which the theatre communicates.

Henry IV

A young man takes part in a masquerade and chooses to impersonate the eleventh-century German emperor Henry IV. The woman he loves, Matilda, participates as the emperor’s historic enemy, Matilda, Countess of Tuscany. During the cavalcade ‘Henry’ is thrown from his horse which has been pricked by his rival Tito Belcredi. When he awakes, he really believes he is the emperor and, thanks to the generosity of his sister, is allowed to live in this illusion in a villa transformed into a medieval castle with servants as ‘privy counsellors’. Twelve years later he regains his senses, but decides to maintain the pretence of madness that grants him both the freedom to construct his own little world and a standpoint from which he can challenge the shallow assumptions on which society is based.