Arising from those whom the workaday world has excluded, it can exist only in isolation from that world. Thus art becomes a hermetic activity and the excluded become the exclusive. Performance theatre, on the other hand, insists on art as communication. It cannot exist without the kind of creative imagination that, for Pirandello, is the source of all art and is embodied by Cotrone; but it seeks to harness that creativity and reconnect it with the world it has abandoned. For Ilse art is an essential dimension of humanity which should be offered to all men, whether they like it or not. In her single-minded devotion to this ideal she will suffer a death reminiscent of the archetypal performer Orpheus, battered and broken by an enraged mob.

Pirandello does not ask us to choose between Cotrone and Ilse. Cotrone, the freewheeling anarchist and illusionist, is obviously the more attractive figure, especially if we think in terms of sheer spectacle. But his marvels and miracles have a superficial dazzling quality that is in tune with his regressive desire to escape adult responsibility: ‘I’ve told you already to learn from children who first invent a game and then believe in it and live it as true … If we were children once, we can always be children’ (MG, p. 179). It is not hard to see the limits of Cotrone’s playpen inventiveness. If Ilse’s high-minded alternative appears no less obviously flawed, this is largely because she herself is so unqualified to serve as a representative of the communicative function of the theatre. She shows no understanding of how art is shaped by the imagination and no readiness to compromise either with her fellow actors or with her audience. Whereas Cotrone, as Strehler notes, ‘sums up all the possibilities of the theatre’, Ilse has no repertoire other than a single play that happens to be rooted in her own emotional experience and demands to be repeated and rejected over and over again. It is not the least of Pirandello’s paradoxes that Cotrone who cuts himself off from society has the broadest of human sympathies as we see from his treatment of the various misfits who compose his group, whereas Ilse who insists on taking art out amid the world of men is an unbending fanatic who listens to nobody and sacrifices not only herself but two of her troupe.

The play as Pirandello left it breaks off as the thunderous arrival of the Mountain Giants strikes terror into the hearts of Cotrone’s followers and guests. Yet in Stefano Pirandello’s detailed account of his father’s intentions for the unwritten conclusion it is not the Giants themselves (who never appear on stage) but their brutal workforce, coarsened by heavy manual labour, who are responsible for the riot that leads to Ilse’s death. This may reflect Pirandello’s reluctance to mount anything that might seem like a direct attack on a Fascist regime that still accorded him a fair measure of official respect. It is also, however, an indication that his real concern is not with any particular form of government, whether authoritarian or democratic, but with the whole of modern industrial society which has left art without a social function. The Giants, after all, behave as well as one can expect from rulers who ‘are intent on vast projects to possess the powers and riches of the earth’ (MG, p. 183): they subsidize the theatre as an entertainment for their workforce and are ready to pay compensation when things turn out badly. Despite Ilse’s terrible fate, there is no suggestion that the creative activity of Cotrone’s villa will be in any way disturbed, and though the Count may proclaim that poetry has died with his wife, this is pure hyperbole. Poetry will surely continue to exist, as Auden puts it, ‘in the valley of its making where executives | Would never want to tamper’. The tragedy is not that art is in danger of extinction, but that marginalization and irrelevance will be the price it pays for survival.

The evolution of the theatre from nineteenth-century naturalism to the diversity of its modern modes is essentially the work of two dramatists: one is Strindberg, the other is Pirandello. In both cases the extraordinarily pervasive influence is based on a few plays which amount to a very small sample of their massive output, and in both cases much of the abundant non-dramatic work remains unfamiliar or unavailable to those who cannot read the original language. An effective summing-up of Pirandello’s work would, therefore, need to take into account the difference between his achievement as it appears in its Italian context and as it appears to the world at large. Our conclusion can do no more than point to some salient aspects of the latter.

The most obvious feature of Pirandello’s influence is to be found in the extensive use of metatheatrical devices by authors as diverse as Brecht, Genet, and Tom Stoppard. It is no accident that in his critical essays and especially in the Preface to Six Characters Pirandello uses the term ‘representation’ (rappresentazione) for a far wider variety of activities than is normal in English usage—as a synonym for description, narration, symbolic substitution, artistic realization, and theatrical performance. What this suggests is that Pirandello’s metatheatre, unlike Brecht’s didactic distancing effect, is deeply rooted in his conviction that we have no sure access to reality. To think of the theatre as represention is to reject the Aristotelian idea of mimesis on the grounds that we cannot copy what we cannot know. To the same scepticism we can also attribute Pirandello’s role as a forerunner of Beckett, Ionesco, and to some degree Harold Pinter in the presentation of situations where actions are repetitive, developments illusory, and endings arbitrary since they can only leave us where we started out. Signora Ponza will continue to be both a first and second wife; the Six Characters are left still looking for an author; Henry IV remains locked in his imperial role.