Henry’s archaic (Leonardo Sciascia would say Sicilian) attitude to women allows for sainted mothers or whores, but has no room for a lover. Thus, in his role as Henry IV, he has prostitutes brought in to satisfy his sexual needs while the only two women who have ever meant anything to him, his sister and Matilda, are transformed into mother and mother-in-law respectively. In this light, it is tempting to see his seizing of Frida and stabbing of Belcredi as a last desperate effort to abandon his womb-like retreat and re-enter the arena of sexual competition. It is also a reaction to the shock of discovering that change has become impossible because form has conquered life, the Tilgherian moment that Henry himself had described:

in all good faith, the lot of us, we’ve adopted some fine fixed idea of ourselves. And yet, Monsignor, while you stand fast, holding on to your sacred vestments with both hands, here, out of your sleeves something comes slipping and slithering away like a snake without you noticing. Life, Monsignor! And it comes as a surprise when you see it suddenly take shape before you, escaping like that. There’s anger and spite against yourself; or remorse, remorse as well. (HIV, p. 89)

Many accounts of the play have pointed to the irony of a conclusion where Henry’s attempt to escape from the role he has assumed ends by condemning him to it. But is he really trying to rid himself of his mask? His violent action, provoked by Belcredi’s assertion ‘You’re not mad!’, is, in fact, radically ambiguous. That brutal irruption into the real world can also be seen as deriving from a last instinctive urge to withraw into the safety of official insanity. Henry, says the stage direction, is ‘appalled at the living force of his own fiction’ (HIV, p. 124) which has proved him unfit for life; and yet, as he gathers his counsellors around him and retreats behind his imperial mask, it is left to the reader or the actor to decide whether in his closing words—‘here together, here together … and for ever’—the dominant emotion is one of horror, resignation, or relief.

The Mountain Giants

The Mountain Giants, the unfinished play that Pirandello was working on at the time of his death in 1936, was conceived as the last of a trilogy of myths. Myth, as Pirandello uses the term, may be taken to mean any ideal (or ‘fiction’) which we use to give meaning to our common experience and which, precisely because it cannot ultimately be realized in concrete terms, offers a permanent motive for change. The first play in the trilogy, The New Colony (1928), examines the social myth through the attempt of a group of outcasts and idealists to create a self-sufficient Utopian community; the second, Lazarus (1929), takes up the religious myth in the emergence of a new nature-based and dogma-free spirituality; The Mountain Giants deals with the myth of art.

Pirandello had been working on the play since 1929 and this unusually long gestation can be explained by a developing crisis in his relations with Italy’s Fascist regime. Disillusioned, as so many Italians were, by the failure of parliamentary democracy to fulfil the Garibaldian ideals of national unity and social justice, he had joined the party in 1924, and in public at least that adherence never wavered. There were, however, cracks beneath the surface. Mussolini failed to give full support to the dramatist’s plans for a national theatre and the Fascist aesthetic found D’Annunzio’s patriotic grandiloquence more to its taste than Pirandello’s existential questioning. Official congratulations on the award of the Nobel Prize in 1934 were more polite than enthusiastic. The clearest sign, however, that Pirandello was now out of step with the regime came with The Fable of the Changeling Son (1934), the verse play that he gave as a libretto to the composer Gian Francesco Malipiero. Based on Sicilian folklore, the story is that of the beautiful Son stolen away to be brought up as a prince while a deformed changeling takes his place. At the end the Son is reunited with the Mother, returns to live a humble life with her in the sunlit South, and renounces his gloomy northern kingdom in favour of the changeling. First performed in Germany, the opera was immediately banned for fear that the deformed changeling might be associated with Hitler. In Italy also performances were cancelled after Mussolini had already excised a passage that seemed to denigrate the idea of the providential Leader: ‘Believe me, change this crown of glass and paper to one of gold and precious stones, this little cape into a regal mantle, and the comic king becomes a king in earnest that you bow down before. There’s nothing else needed, just as long as you believe it’ (MN iv. 803). This is the same play that Countess Ilse and her company bring to the remote villa of the Scalognati at the start of The Mountain Giants.

Pirandello’s experience with The Fable of the Changeling Son did not provoke a rejection of Fascist ideology, but it did intensify his growing concern with the role of art in society as exemplified by the theatre. In a letter to Marta Abba Pirandello described the subject of The Mountain Giants as ‘the triumph of fantasy, the triumph of poetry, but also the tragedy of poetry in this brutal modern world’.7 Ilse and her itinerant troupe come to the magical villa of Cotrone in the hope that he will help them arrange a public performance of The Changeling Son, the play written by the poet who loved her and to which she has dedicated her life. Cotrone, however, urges her to remain at the villa where the play will mysteriously create itself, freed from the constraints of the theatre and the incomprehension of a philistine society. Giorgio Strehler, whose 1967 Milan production gave The Mountain Giants a new lease of life, saw Cotrone and Ilse as illustrating the difference between what he called pure theatre and performance theatre.8 Pure theatre exists only within the magic confines of the villa, a ludic and solipsistic zone of untrammelled creativity where there is no mediating factor between the imagination and its emanations.