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play within a play, and challenges the conventional
distinctions between appearance and reality by constantly
switching levels. Erving Goffman, in Frame Analysis (An
Essay on the Organization of Experience) notes that
Pirandello uses three main formats for raising the issue of
appearance and reality and tackling the question of frame:
The Theatre-in-the-Theatre Plays
By Susan Bassnett-McGuire
The trilogy of “theatre-in-the-theatre” plays testifies to
Luigi Pirandello's continued attempts to explore the
complexity of the relationship between stage and life, by
destroying the naturalist convention of the fourth wall and
bringing the audience face to face with the bare bones of
theatrical technique. The three plays that comprise the
trilogy were written at different stages in Pirandello's career:
Six Characters in Search of an Author was first performed
in 1921, Each in His Own Way was first performed in Rome
in 1924 and Tonight We Improvise was first performed in
Germany, at Koenigsberg, in 1929, followed a year later by
the first Italian production in Turin.
The fortunes of these three plays have been very
different. Six Characters, as one of Pirandello's best known
works, continues to be regarded as a classic piece of
experimental theatre, whereas the other two plays have not
been nearly so popular, perhaps because the history of their
staging is undistinguished compared to the fame of
productions such as the Pitoeff or Rheinhardt Six
Characters. Each in His Own Way was not performed in
Italian for 37 years after its first staging, until the Teatro
Carignano in Turin produced it in 1961. And although
Tonight We Improvise has been staged more frequeutly, it is
still not very well known outside Italy. One reason for the
discrepancy in the number of productions of these two plays
might be the sheer physical difficulties of the huge casts
involved, while another explanation must surely lie in the
relatively slight impact they made compared to the succes
de scandale of Six Characters.
Pirandello's attack on the naturalist conventions of
bourgeois theatre was not unique by any means, and his
work should be seen in the context of a series of radical
experiments in theatre practice. From the late nineteenth
century onwards various alternatives to the conventions of
the fourth wall were in evidence in theatres throughout
Europe, and it would be fairer to see Pirandello's
contribution as part of that wider movement than to claim,
as some critics have done, that he occupies a pre-eminent
position as an innovator. Landor McClintock, in his book
that locates Pirandello within the wider context of Italian
theatre, shows how far Pirandello was indebted to the
grottesco school, typified by the plays of Luigi Chiarelli and
Rosso di San Secondo whose works have more than a touch
of Grand Guignol. What distinguishes the plays of the
trilogy, however, is the way in which Pirandello moves
beyond the use of the stage as a means to attack either
bourgeois drama or the popular highly rhetorical poetic
drama of writers like D'Annunzio, to probe the whole nature
of the convention of stage reality. He returns to the favoured
device of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, that of the
In one, illustrated by Henry IV and The Rules of
the Game, the traditional respect for projected
characters is sustained. In the second, Six
Characters in Search of an Author, the
conventional performer-character formula is
attacked, but the attack stops at the stage line. In
the third, this line between onstage and
auditorium is breached in various ways.
Each in His Own Way and Tonight We Improvise belong to
this third category, when the security of the audience has
been undermined to the extent that no-one knows whether
he is sitting next to an actor disguised as a member of the
audience or a 'real' person. In this way the theatrical
experience mirrors Pirandello's vision of life as an
indefinable and unstoppable process where security of
perception is mere illusion.
Six Characters in Search of an Author
Six Characters is a play about the creation of a play,
the two-fold process that takes place, first in the author's
mind and then on the stage when the actors and director
take over. It is as though Pirandello were seeking to present
the notions of relativity of perception, language and
communication in a suitable form, suitable insofar as it too
is relative, subject to change and interpretation.
In the Preface to the play, added four years after the
first production and coinciding with the redrafting of large
parts of the text, Pirandello explains the function of the
Characters in relation to his own creative process. The play
represents the coming together of art and life, of fixed form
and moving vitality, but Pirandello has gone even further in
his examination of this question, because he shows not only
the problems of creating a play, but also the futility, since
the play is just one more of the illusions that man builds to
convince himself he can escape frorn the processes that
shape his existence.
Six Characters is constructed on the three-act principle,
with stage tricks being employed to blur the divisions into
acts. The first section ends with the Characters and then the
Actors leaving the stage, to take a natural break for twenty
minutes, as it were, while the curtain remains up. The
second section ends when the curtain is “accidentally” let
down by a stage hand, thus the formal division is
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maintained while at the same time the illusion of
spontaneity is created. This highly disciplined technique
that nevertheless creates the impression of being radically
innovative led Pirandello to comment, vin a letter to
Ruggero Ruggeri shortly before his death in 1936, that the
play was “a true classic tragedy in which all the essential
elements have been renewed”, even though critics perceived
it was “the newest form of expression in theatre”.
The structure of the play defies straightforward plot
summary, but the action can roughly be outlined as follows:
a director rehearsing his actors for a performance of
Pirandello's The Rules of the Game is interrupted by the
arrival of six individuals (in Pitoeff's Paris production they
arrived dramatically in a lift) who claim to be looking for an
author to dramatize the story they have to tell. Through the
first section of the play something of this story begins to
unfold, as the Father and the Stepdaughter, locked in
conflict with each other, attempt to win the director over to
their respective points of view. The other Characters, the
suffering Mother, the reluctant Son and the two silent small
children remain on the fringes of this debate. What emerges
as the discussion proceeds is that at some time in the past
the Mother had gone to live with another man and had
children by him, but whether this was because of the
Father's cruelty or because of his generosity in wanting her
to be happy elsewhere cannot be clarified. What is clear is
that there is no communication between the Characters,
whose multiple points of view prevent them from any
understanding of the motivation of the others. The Father's
speech on the futility of words is of central significance in
this first section.
The Father's version of events, wherein he presents
himself as a man motivated by love for the Mother and her
children and by his belief in morality, is contrasted by the
Stepdaughter's version. She depicts the Father as a moral
coward and a disgusting human being, a man who followed
her secretly to school as a child and who finally came face
to face with her as a client of Madame Pace, the millinermadame for whom the Stepdaughter had gone to work to
help support the family after the death of her father. In
section II Madame Pace appears, “summoned up” by the
Characters to enact the scene where Father meets
Stepdaughter in the back room of the shop and, in a moment
o~ high melodrama, the incestuous encounter is interrupted
by the screams of the Mother.
In the third section the unhappy story moves to its
tragic climax The Father has brought the mother and her
family back to his house again, a move opposed by the
sullen, angry Son. The Mother tries in vain to win the Son
over, since his rejection of her is unbearably painful. While
her attention is focused on him the little girl drowns in the
fountain in the garden and the small boy who has
throughout the play been the object of the Stepdaughter's
contempt shoots himself. The Stepdaughter flees from the
house, leaving Father, Mother and Son locked in their
irresolvable anguish.
Such are the apparent “facts” of the Characters' story,
and such was the distaste aroused by that story that
audiences and critics were shocked and repelled by the
squalor of it all when the play first appeared. But as with all
Pirandello's plays the components of the plot are utilized for
other ends. In Six Characters the details of the story emerge
gradually as the Characters argue with each other and with
the Director and Actors in scenes that are often extremely
funny. The attempts in section II of the Actors to take on the
roles of the Father and Stepdaughter illustrate the
impossibility of art representing life, while the confusion
that follows the apparent death of the children, when Actors
and Director fail to agree on the reality of what they have
seen, testifies to the power of art. The impossibility of
resolving this conflict is summed up in the final words of
the Director who curses them all for wasting his time in
vain.
The cast list divides the persons appearing in the play
into two separate groups: the Actors and the Director on the
one hand and the Characters of the play in the making on
the other. The Characters are listed simply by their positions
vis-á-vis a family: the Father; the Mother; the Stepdaughter;
the Son; the Boy; the Little Girl. There is one additional
Character, Madame Pace, described in the cast list as
evocata (summoned up), as indeed she is, later in the play.
The division between the Characters and the others is
continually reiterated over and over again, and from the
moment of the Characters' first appearance the stage
directions state that the separation must be presented in
clear stage terms that the audience can grasp at once.
Pirandello suggests that this may be effectively
accomplished by means of lighting, by the contrast set up
between the Actors already on the stage and the Characters
entering through the auditorium, but feels that the best
method of all is the use of masks for the Characters. The
masks must be of a lightweight material and leave eyes,
jiostrils and mouth free. In this way, he explains, the
meaning of the play will become clear:
The Characters must not appear as phantoms but
as artificial realities created out of unvarying
fantasy. In this way they appear more real and
consistent than the changeable naturalness of the
Actors. Masks will help to give the impression of
figures created through Art, each fixed
unvaryingly in the expression of his or her basic
feeling: remorse for the Father, revenge for the
Stepdaughter, disdain for the Son, grief for the
Mother.
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In addition to the masks, directions are given for their
clothes to be stiff and heavy, to give a statue-like
appearance. Pirandello goes to great lengths in this later
version of the play to ensure that there will be striking
visual distinctions between the two groups and that the
appearance of the Six Characters will intensify the idea of
fixity and lack of fluid movement and change of expression.
Pirandello's directions stress the stylization of the
Characters' appearance, and only if this is borne in mind
does the structure of the play make full sense. The mistake
so often made in productions of Six Characters is to reverse
those directions, to make the Characters appear “natural” in
contrast to the absurd over-acting of the Actors led by the
poseur Director. The scenes where the Actors try to re-enact
what the Characters have performed for them are bound to
be very different in emphasis if the Actors are made to seem
wooden and comically incompetent, and the Characters
are presented naturalistically.
In addition to the details of the differing physical
appearance of the two groups, the division between
Characters and Actors is further emphasized by directions
for their playing on stage. At the end of section I the two
groups leave separately and when the curtain is raised the
start of section III they are seen sitting on opposite sides of
the stage. In this way the breakdown of attempted
communication of the first two sections is shown quite
clearly. Actors and Characters have tried and failed to come
together, and after the culminating failure of the Madame
Pace scene, the gulf continues to widen, until, in the final
moments there is not even an attempt at communication
between the two groups.
Throughout the play the Director and the Characters
clash on two fundamental issues: the problem of defining
the limitations of theatre and the distinction between
rehearsing and living a scene. This clash of views reaches
its climax in section II when Madame Pace “materializes”
on stage. As the Characters prepare for their scene in the
room at the back of her shop, the Director calls in the
Prompter to write down everything that is said so that it can
be used later. The prompter's duty has been reversed — his
function now is to turn life into a written text instead of
reminding actors of their lines from a predetermined script.
Moreover, the gap between the life script and the theatre
script involves the need for certain conventions of art to be
followed. So when the Stepdaughter reminds the Director
that the dress the Father tried to make her take off was black
because she was still in mourning, the Director tries to
dismiss her, on the grounds that that would be too much for
the public to take. The Stepdaughter argues back:
THE DIRECTOR: What truth, for God's sake?
This is the theatre. - We can only take so much
truth here.
Only certain things are performable in the theatre, and the
Director insists that he is not concerned with life as it
happened, but with life as it can be presented to the public
within the package called theatre. The play returns again
and again to a discussion of this problem, to the distinction
between the Characters' insistence on reproducing the truth
of their story and the Director's attempts to fit the details
they give him into a suitable frame, regardless of whether or
not he makes any alterations. The keyword prova
(rehearsal) recurs throughout the play and is used with
greatest frequency in section II where, as the following
example demonstrates, the word shows up the abyss
between the two groups gathered on stage for totally
different purposes:
THE DIRECTOR: Right now we re going to try
and have a rehearsal. They'll do it. (Pointing to
the Actors)
THE FATHER: (stunned, as if he had just
dropped onto the stage from nowhere) We are?
I'm sorry, but what do you mean by a rehearsal?
THE DIRECTOR: I mean a rehearsal - a
rehearsal for them. (Pointing to the Actors)
THE FATHER: But if we're the characters . .
THE DIRECTOR: OK fine, you're the
'characters', but here, friend, characters don't act.
Actors do the acting. Characters stay there
(pointing to the Prompter) in the script.
So the conflict goes on: Madame Pace's accent proves so
amusing to the Actors that the Director tells her to keep on
using it, because it will have certain effect, and the
Stepdaughter counters by saying that this is how she speaks
in life. At the end of section II and the beginning of the next
section, the Director talks about splitting the Characters'
story into “Acts” and sees the Mother's interruption of the
scene between the Father and the Stepdaughter as an
'effective' climax to his Act I. In section III, the Director
arranges a garden, and again there is a clash between what
he expects and what the Characters intend to do. The Son
and Mother maintain that they cannot be in the garden
because their scene takes place in his room, but the Director
dismisses this as irrelevant. It is at this point that the Son
turns and attacks him, in a manner reminiscent of the
Actors' revolt against Hinkfuss in Tonight We Improvise:
THE STEPDAUGHTER: But it's the truth.
Don't you understand yet that you can't do this
play? We're not inside you at all and your actors
are just looking at us from the outside.
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to be imagined, and the conflicting versions return again to
the problem of the relativity of perception and
interpretation. The Father tries to talk about this problem in
section I:
Communication between the Characters and the Director
proves to be impossible. The Father tries to explain the
contrast between the life of a Character, fixed in
“unchangeable reality” and the life of someone like the
Director whose reality is part of a fluid process that time
can alter and distort, but the Director cannot understand. He
keeps insisting on the importance of the rules of theatre,
refusing to consider anything that cannot be explained in his
terms.
Throughout the play he is concerned with rehearsing,
firstly with his Actors and then, after the arrival of the
Characters, with their story. The bare stage and the
technicians who come and go, the actors in brightly
coloured everyday clothes and the Director's constant
interruptions all serve as a visual reminder to the audience
of the “rehearsal” in progress. The Director agrees to the
Father's request for an opportunity to present their drama,
but sees the request almost as a joke—and when he calls
together the Actors and Technicians to watch two
Characters play their scenes, he reiterates the word prova.
After the Madame Pace scene, the Actors take over the
“rehearse” what they have just witnessed, except that now,
of course, the situation is changed and what was life is
presented as art in a contrived form. The Director perceives
the Characters' scenes as “rehearsals”, but as they continue
to insist, what they are enacting is their life, their reality.
When the Actors try to repeat the same scene it is different,
and the Father and Stepdaughter are appalled at seeing
themselves reflected in the inadequate mirror provided by
the Actors playing the roles.
But the word prova in Italian has more than one
meaning. It can be “rehearsal” or “trial” and it can also be
the third person singular, present indicative, of the verb
provare (to feel, experience). The same sounding word can,
in different contexts, have an opposite meaning. For the
Characters, provare has the significance of “feeling” and
reinforces the suffering they have come to present, whereas
for the Director, suffering is only apparent in its outward
manifestations that have to be rehearsed for the right effect.
Such a distinction in terms is lost when the play is read or
seen in English.
Another key word that recurs through the play is
Livimaginare (to imagine). In section I, which is largely
dominated by the Father, the phrase Lei s'immagini (Just
imagine) is used repeatedly. As the Characters try to build a
background to their story, they have to keep appealing to
the Director and the Actors to “imagine” certain situations,
in the same way that all theatre requires an effort of
imagination on the part of an audience. The Characters'
story is compressed into two scenes: the encounter between
the Father and Stepdaughter in Madame Pace's shop and the
death of the children in the garden. The rest of the story has
The drama for me is all here, sir: in the
awareness I have that though each one of us
thinks he's uniquely consistent, you see, even
believes it, it isn't true. Everyone is many people,
sir, many people according to all the possibilities
of being that are in all of us. We're one person
here, another person with somebody else—
completely different. Yet all the time we have
this illusion of being the same for everybody and
of being that one person we think we are in
everything we do. It' just not true. And we come
to realize that when something terrible happens
and because of one thing we do we suddenly find
ourselves hooked and hanging in the air, so to
speak. What I mean is, we can see that not every
bit of ourselves is involved in that one action and
so it would be a wicked injustice to judge us by
that action alone, to keep us hooked up and
suspended on gallows for our whole lifetime, as
if our existence itself were summed up in that
one action.
The Father protests that the Stepdaughter has judged and
condemned him by what he describes as “one fleeting
shameful moment” in his life. He continues to argue that he
is a decent, moral man in spite of his visit to Madame Pace's
and resents the way in which the Stepdaughter has allowed
that one incident to colour her view of him as a human
being. But there is another dimension to the Father's speech:
in his position as a Character created by an author but part
of an uncompleted story, his protest is against the irony that
has condemned him to such fixity, with no additional scenes
that might alter the balance in anyway.
Early in section 1, the Father talks about the
uselessness of words as a means of communication,
although he constantly tries to “intellectualize” the situation,
and this section contains many long, didactic monologues
spoken by the Father. He and the Stepdaughter are the most
articulate of the Characters because, as the Prologue
explains, they are the most complete, “the most alive, most
fully rounded”. The Mother, however, is the “resigned
victim”, whilst the children “have hardly any consistency at
all except barely in their appearance and have to be led on
by the hand”. The Son, who is conceived on yet another
level, is described as “reluctant”, and right from the start,
when the Father tries to include him with the others he
declares that he has nothing to do with the other Characters'
search for an author.
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The Son's first entry shows his resentment and the
positioning of the Characters in their first meeting with the
Director emphasizes this feeling in strong visual terms. The
Stepdaughter enters in a rush, arriving first on stage, closely
followed by the Father, while the Mother and children wait
halfway. The Son alone makes no attempt to join the others,
and is thus immediately isolated, while his attitude is seen to
be very different from that of the other characters. As the
Characters unfold their story the Son keeps trying to stay
out of it all, denying his involvement almost to the end. Yet
when told to go by the Stepdaughter he finds that he cannot;
the stage directions describe him as “bound by an almost
occult power”. The Stepdaughter exults—“He has to stay
here, he's forced to, he's bound to the chain forever.” The
Son, whether he likes it or not, was created as part of the
family and must share in their tragedy. There can be no
escape from what is predetermined and as a Character he
has no choice but to stay. On another level, he is tied to the
stage because as an actor his world begins when he steps out
in front of the audience and ends when he leaves the stage,
since once an actor is no longer on stage as part of the play
he no longer exists for the audience. He is compelled to live
out his part on stage because once he leaves it he is nothing.
On a third level, the Son represents man condemned to be
alive. If the stage mirrors life and the actor is compelled to
be on that stage in order to exist, so mankind is compelled
to go on living in order to be. The metaphor of the stage as
life is a constant undercurrent in this play and the Six
Characters with their fixed masks bring a life to the stage
that the conscious imitations of the Actors can never have.
The senselessness of the artificial stage world, and of life
itself that brings so much pain, together with the way in
which the one mirrors the other, recalls the most intense
moments of Shakespearean tragedy. The notion of man
condemned to life reflected in the actor condemned to
appear within the confines of the stage is reiterated in
increasingly clear terms in later twentieth-century drama.
With Pirandello the problem is discussed within the limits
of a conventional dramatic framework, because Six
Characters is made to fit the three-act mold. Later in Each
in His Own Way and Tonight We Improvise the basic threeact structure is replaced by something less rigid. In Six
Characters the Son's helplessness may be seen as a foretaste
of the situation in which Beckett's tramps find themselves. It
is a situation where action is futile and provides no solution,
and it is possible to see Beckett's ultimate concept of the
“non-play” as an extension of Pirandello's portrayal of the
reluctant actor. An actor who desires not to appear may be
parallel to a man contemplating suicide—once the step has
been taken and the suicide succeeds, its stage equivalent
must be the “non-play” where there are no actors at all,
nothing but the bare stage without movement or sound, the
final reaches of pessimism that also mean the end of drama.
But there is still a long gap between Pirandello and,
for example, Beckett's Breath (which may be described as a
“non-play” in so far as there is no visual action). The Son
cannot leave the stage, resigns himself and becomes, finally,
the only Character able to speak and relate unequivocally
what he saw:
the boy, the boy just standing there looking
crazy, staring at his little sister drowned in the
pond ...
The Son recounts the final climax, which is completed by
the revolver shot and the Mother's screams. True to his
original stated intentions, he has refused to participate in
any “scenes”, but being bound to the family and to the stage
he must play his part in the tragedy. He has no freedom to
leave, he can only choose not to speak and at the end even
this choice is denied him as he becomes the narrator, in a
half conscious way “slowly, staring straight ahead”. At this
point, he has a function similar to that of the Chorus in
Greek tragedy, a part of the total visual play and yet a nonperformer in the actions of the plot.
The Son's inability to leave the stage is another
example of the “magic” power the theatre can have. In the
final scene, the stage directions refer specifically to this
power, when the Stepdaughter calls her Mother “as though
pulling her forward by some magic power”. The Characters
themselves in their masks and costumes clash with the
Actors and these clashes are a constant reminder of the
contrast between the “magical” world of the theatre and the
world outside its boundaries. Most crucial of all scenes in
this respect is the one where Madame Pace is “summoned
up” in section II.
In the scene where Madame Pace appears, illusion and
reality are deliberately blurred by the author. The Director
has been busily trying to set up a scene to resemble the
interior described by the Characters when he realizes that
Madame Pace is not with them. The Father explains that she
may not be there at that moment but is alive nevertheless.
He then borrows the hats and Coats of some of the Actors
and hangs them on the racks provided, “on show”, to draw
Madame Pace to the stage. When Madam Pace appears, the
stage directions show the terror of the Actors and Director
at the “witchcraft” that has brought about her sudden
arrival. The Actors then protest, saying that some kind of
trick must have been played on them. They are incapable of
seeing her entry in stage terms and therefore are terrified by
what appears to be an illogical occurrence of life. The
Actors, watching the scene, believe that they are watching a
rehearsal, so they study the Characters with the intention of
later repeating what they have seen. The hats and coats are
props, and the Young Actress interrupts to remind the
Characters and audience of this fact. But on another level
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they are not props, they are indeed the hats belonging to
Madame Pace, an intricate part of her life as created by the
author who outlined the Characters' story. Imagination has
created the special reality of theatre. In the final scene, the
fact of the child drowning is laid down in the story outlined
by the author and is quite unrelated to whether the fountain
we see is a fake and was carried on by a stagehand. In so far
as the stage represents life and in so far as the Characters
have a tragic story to unfold and live out, the two children
must die and, as the Father cries in his last desperate speech,
it is no fiction for them but reality.
Six Characters presents the audience with an “underplay”, with the tools, the executors and the characters for a
play, leaving the interpretation to the relative understanding
of the audience. But at the same time it is a play that an
audience goes to watch performed in a theatre. pirandello
has created a play about the processes of artistic creation, a
study of the relativity of form enclosed within a formal
framework. It is therefore not only a play that contains
within it another play; it is a play about the nature of the
play constructed on a Chinese box principle, where the
answering of one question merely opens the lid to another.
Susan Bassnett-McGuire. (1983). “The Theatre-in-theTheatre Plays.” Luigi Pirandello. Grove Press Inc.
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coincides with an authoritarian point in Italy's history. Thus
it is possible to see the structural medium of
metatheatricality as symptomatic of a particular political
context. As Lope de Vega did in his auto sacrementale,
Acting Is Believing (Lo fingido verdadero), Pirandello uses
immersion to draw spectators into the liminal territory that
separates a character from the actor who plays him or her.
Unfortunately, at the end of Six Characters in Search of an
Author, Pirandello deserts the spectators in this no man's
land. In Lope's play, this fissure is defined by Christian
martyrdom.
A brief explanation of Lope's play will assist with the
development of the argument regarding character in
Pirandello's. In Acting is Believing Genesius, a great actor
in Diocletian's Rome, sees a vision of the Trinity and
converts while giving a performance (before the emperor)
that was initially intended to parody the baptized Christian.
Because of his revelation, Genesius departs from the script
and implicates himself by announcing that he is not acting
but truly is a Christian. He is sentenced to death and
impaled. Both an actor and a playwright, Genesius
"becomes" the character of the baptized Christian,
eliminating the split between character and actor and
resulting in the death of both actor and playwright. A kind
of theatrical energy lies within this liminal area, the
boundaries of which are constructed out of the difference
between character and actor. This energy—an energy
oscillating between two distinct aspects of performance—
radiates meaning. In Six Characters, Pirandello does not
explore the characters' or the actors' liminal truths except as
they pertain to the conflict between literary and dramatic
form. In Acting Is Believing, the union of character and
actor glosses over the human struggle against tyranny with
simplistic Christian resignation. Perhaps it is a necessary
characteristic of theatre that a space separates character
from actor. But this space is not a void; rather, it brims with
performative meaning.
This actor/character schism has been addressed with
perhaps surprising results in the experimental work of
Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret in the production Doga
Musica's Butterflies, a solo performance by Odin actor Julia
Varley. In Doha Musica's Butterflies Barba and Varley pick
up the loose ends of Pirandello's position by addressing the
metatheatrical paradox of the irreconcilable separation of
actor from character, or the impossibility of fully becoming
another thing. Pirandello and Barba are by no means
mutually explanatory: Pirandello's theatre was bourgeois
and newly modern, whereas Barba's is profoundly
suspicious of both middle-class values and the positivism
that characterizes modernity. Both do, nevertheless, focus
on the actor/ character divide. Before addressing this
convergence, it is important to acknowledge the key
differences between Barba's work and Pirandello's.
The Odin is headed by the highly esteemed Barba,
whose theatre apprenticeship was as the late Jerzy
Grotowski's assistant from 1962 to 1964. Barba was the
editor of Grotowski's groundbreaking methodological/
theoretical treatise Towards a Poor Theatre. In 1964, Barba
No Longer in Search of an Author,
a Character Defines Herself:
Pirandello's Six Characters in
Search of an Author and Eugenio
Barba's Experimental Performance
Methodology.
By Seth Baumrin
Luigi Pirandello's work is unique among earlytwentieth-century playwrights, in part because of his
freedom from false intellectual positions—the "isms." In his
coup de theatre, Six Characters in Search of an Author
(1922), Pirandello took neither August Strindberg's
theoretical stance proposing a "characterless" drama in his
Foreword to Miss Julie (64) nor Bertolt Brecht's position, in
his "Short Organum for the Theatre," that a character should
be constructed out of opposites, as a "man standing in a
valley and making a speech" whose gradually changing
views echo off the mountainside only to meet and contradict
each other as they reverberate (191). Both Brecht and
Strindberg saw the notion of character as classist;
Strindberg called "character" the "middle class term for the
automaton" (64). For them, character was a static,
prefabricated facet of the mainstream theatre apparatus that
reflects the value system of the ruling class, or what has
come to be known as dominant culture. Yet by thus
attacking the notion of character as an agent of dominant
culture, they confirm the incredible power of character as
performance's mystical unifying factor. In Six Characters
Pirandello demonstrates that characters are autonomous and
that their organic composition stems from something other
than the author, actor, or culture. This article establishes a
link between Pirandello's exploration of characters and
Eugenio Barba's more recent examination of the actor/
character relationship. First, however, it is necessary to
provide a Pirandellian context for characters and actors.
It may seem ironic that Pirandello was on good terms
with the ruling class. He publicly supported Mussolini, but
his writing in no way reflects Fascist ideology; in fact, it
may resist such authority. The subtle metatheatricality and
formalism of Pirandello's plays are also evinced by authors
in other nations under authoritarian if not totalitarian
regimes, most notably Spanish dramatists Lope de Vega,
Calderon de la Barca, Ramon Valle-Inclan, Federico Garcia
Lorca, and Antonio Buero Vallejo. These dramatists use
what has come to be known as the "immersion effect," a
dramaturgical device proposed by Spanish critic Ricardo
Domenech to involve both character and spectator in the
drama's illusion to the extent that they are unable to accept
that it is fictional (Holt viii-ix). Although the inherent
metatheatricality of Spanish drama cannot be attributed
solely to national politics, Pirandello's own metatheatricality
7
made it his mission to compel Polish authorities to allow
Grotowski the freedom to leave Poland and tour with his
Teaterlaboratorium performances. Largely because of
Barba's international efforts, the Teaterlaboratorium was
able to perform at the 1966 Theatre of Nations in Paris.
Barba's first significant professional achievement was to
expose the theatre world to the profession's most influential
pioneer/ reformer since Stanislavski.
Perhaps Barba, an Italian-born, expatriate theatre
director (now a Danish citizen), would resent comparison
with Pirandello. Barba, the rebellious son of a high-ranking
officer in Mussolini's army who was killed in action in
North Africa, dropped out of military school in the late
1950s and hitchhiked around Europe, working as a welder
and in the merchant marine. In Oslo he studied religion and
Norwegian literature, and in 1960 he traveled to Poland on
a UNESCO grant, ostensibly to study Brecht and the art of
directing. He met the young Grotowski in a bar and
subsequently left theatre school to spend four years under
his tutelage in Wroclaw before opening Odin Teatret in
Oslo in 1964. Barba's company continues to thrive in 2000
in Holstebro, Denmark, where it moved in 1966. The
company's current members include two of its Norwegian
founders from 1964 and many of its original Danish
members, who joined between 1966 and 1970, as well as an
Italian who joined in 1974 and a British member (Julia
Varley) in 1976. In 1979 Barba founded the International
School of Theatre Anthropology, and since then he has
functioned as a theatre director while actively organizing
and participating in annual ISTA congresses of theatre
scholars and professionals. Perhaps this Italian would
renounce Pirandello, not so much for his connection to
Mussolini but rather because, throughout his career, Barba
has renounced the primacy of the dramatic text, the very
sanctity of which led Pirandello, in his early writings, to
portray actors as necessary evils.
In decrying illustrators, translators, and actors as
incapable of transmitting an author's ideas, Pirandello
writes,
taxonomy of role status. The deepest roots of these playing
conventions are found in commedia dell'arte practice and
had become so fixed that, well after commedia fell out of
favor, the residual custom of character typing and hierarchy
placed severe limitations on playwrights. Unlike their
Russian counterparts, Italian theatre reformers were not
considering the notion of a director who works
collaboratively in a theatre studio, training actors whose
process determines its result.
To grasp fully Pirandello's position regarding acting, it
is first necessary to explain the conditions that prevailed
during the reform of Italian theatre. In the final decades of
the nineteenth century, after unification in 1860, Italian
theatre was driven by a nationalist impulse toward a more
literary theatre than had until then been known. Playwrights
turned away from the buffoonery and provincial dialects of
commedia dell'arte and its descendants and toward a
dramaturgy that supported unification's organizational
social goals. The primary goal, to unite one people, was
articulated most succinctly by essayist Massimo
d'Azeglio—to "make Italians" (qtd. in Lorch 141).
Pirandello filled a need congruent with modernity. In his
work, the post-unification social comedy was transformed
into a more radical drama that reflected a darker side of
Italy's middle class and its institutionalized theatre of
bourgeois consolidation. (1) These changes were part of the
larger Teatro Stabile movement (1898-1920), which was
characterized by men of letters running repertory theatres in
the cities as an alternative to the touring companies that
endlessly traveled, never attaching themselves to any city or
region. The desire of Teatro Stabile producers was to
present a theatre in Italian that was concerned with moral
and spiritual issues, in addition to a repertory free from
local box office and the popular demand for well-made
plays. Their penchant for productions of foreign playwrights
such as Ibsen and Pinero opened the door for something
both innovative and decidedly Italian. From Domenico
Lanza's Teatro d'Arte in Milan in 1898 to Virgilio Talli's
Dramatica Compagnia di Roma per il Teatro Argentina,
which folded in 1920, the movement constituted a reaction
against decadence in the theatre—not a revolutionary
movement but a necessary reform. Under these
circumstances, experimentation like Pirandello's was rare
and radical. Jennifer Lorch states that his "plays developed
from the social realist drama of the nineteenth century"
(140). Ultimately, Pirandello provided a radical social
critique by twisting the so-called social realist form.
Pirandello's and Barba's pedigrees are disparate. Their
epochs are completely different, as are their relationships to
culture and politics. Comparing their positions with regard
to the infrastructure of theatrical composition produces only
the locus point of the autonomy of the character.
Nevertheless, this idea of character autonomy can be key to
understanding the layers of theatrical work. If Pirandello
explored character from the perspective of a playwright,
Barba takes the role of director to investigate the
performative essence of a theatrical character.
[I]n dramatic art, what is staging if not a huge,
living illustration in action? What are the actors if
not illustrators in their own right? But necessary
illustrators in this case, alas. [...] Unfortunately,
there always has to be a[n] unavoidable element
that intrudes between the dramatic author and his
creation in the material being of the performance:
the actor. ("Illustrators" 26-27, emphasis added)
Pirandello's hostility to the actor is unmistakable. But these
suspicions were part of a larger trend in Italian theatre to
reform the profession, which had traditionally been based
on role hierarchy in production companies. An actor was
restricted to playing characters (and their business)
according to his or her type and was ranked within the
company according to these roles. The ranking designated
the members of each company as either starring actors or a
variety of supporting actors; the actors' pay reflected this
8
As a director, Barba views character as an actor's
creation, not an author's. For him theatrical creation begins
with the actor's physical and vocal training. Barba
transforms the actor's training (in a theatre laboratory
setting) into the raw material for improvisation. The Odin's
improvisations resemble highly complex dances because
they are movement scores constructed out of minute
physical actions. Superimposed upon these improvisations
are the texts that the actors speak or sing. More often than
not these texts are pastiches -- of songs, poems, and prose,
but rarely dramatic texts. Barba has never actually directed
a conventional play with act divisions, a cast of easily
identifiable characters, a plot, and an author whose
intentions are integral to the text and its theatrical
production. Rather, Barba's Odin productions are more akin
to performance art or postmodern dance than to drama. The
Odin's theatre, especially shorter works like Dona Musica's
Butterflies, is often self-referential, reflecting the
performers' own work as actors.
An example of the autobiographical nature of the
Odin's work is Iben Rasmussen's Itsi Bitsi (1992-present). It
is the most topical of the shorter works, dealing realistically
with the legacy of drug addiction and radicalism of the mid1960s, Itsi Bitsi is the story of Rasmussen's relationship
with Elk Skalo, Denmark's first beat poet. It is more
confrontation with than celebration of their relationship,
their journeys, and their ultimate personal deterioration
through addiction. It also addresses the interrelationship
between Rasmussen as actor and the characters she has
played during her career. Throughout Itsi Bitsi Rasmussen
resuscitates characters from earlier Odin productions,
including the Shaman from Come! And the Day Will Be
Ours (1976-1980) and Katrin, Mother Courage's mute
daughter, from Brecht's Ashes (1980-1984), both of whom
speak an invented language. Rasmussen's performance is
testimony to how her work with the Odin awoke her from
self-imposed silence in the aftermath of addiction, a denial
of her identity hidden behind the mask of the thin-voiced
girlfriend of the beat poet, captured by his nickname for her,
Itsi Bitsi. The work is not smugly anti-drug; rather, it
questions how the drugs overwhelmed the politics and how
the drugs, thought of by some as doors to spirituality,
became doors that closed people off from any spirituality.
Rasmussen equates her silence and her inability to interact
with others with women's silence on a larger scale. The
discovery of her now powerful voice, literally and
metaphorically, in turn frees a variety of haunting images
that become her "characters."
The Odin's work is always extremely physical, yet that
physicality does not conform to any distinct genre of dance
or theatre. That being said, Barba's productions cannot be
restricted to the categories of performance art and
postmodern dance, since they are highly theatrical in the
way actions and words are juxtaposed as incisive poetic
interrogations of both human and metaphysical conditions.
The Odin embraces the ethos of a theatre collective as
envisioned by Stanislavski and his students Sulerzhitski and
Vakhtangov; it practices a wide range of acting pedagogies
stemming from the Copeau/Decroux tradition and some
Asian disciplines; and Barba, as its director, pays close
attention to the iconicity of the human form, as did
Meyerhold and Eisenstein.
To a great extent, Barba's directorial approach stems
from that of Grotowski, his mentor, but, as a director, Barba
conveys his mentor's position with greater clarity than did
Grotowski himself. This is largely because Barba has never
renounced theatrical production as his medium, whereas
Grotowski, for good reasons, abandoned directing early in
his career. As Grotowski did in his two most famous
productions, Akropolis and The Constant Prince, Barba
experiments, in his own productions, with the confrontation
or collision of highly trained actors with texts drawn from
poetry and myth. The resulting productions engage
contradictions inherent in the human condition and in the
tragic tradition. For example, the liveliness with which
humans flirt with death is a recurring theme in Barba's
work. His experiments are a kind of luxuriant theatre that
has its roots in the Poor Theatre announced by Grotowski
but moves into a realm where theatre's new riches are only
those inherent in the work itself. They are not the trappings
of what Brecht called theatre "apparatus" ("Modern
Theatre" 34)—the machinery of the institutionalized theatre,
the conspiracies of cultural production that Grotowski
renounced.
The Odin's famous 1974 production Min Fars Hus
(My Father's House) is a good example of how Barba views
text. The work was conceived as a meeting with
Dostoyevsky, whose brush with a firing squad, relationship
with his father, and time spent in a death house in Siberia
formed the context for the performance of a kind of mad
dance of Dostoyevsky and characters from his novels and
life. The text of the performance was constructed partially
from Dostoyevsky's novels and diaries. A significant portion
of the spoken text was created in improvisations based on
scenarios derived from the novels; therefore, the words
were not always those of the so-called author
(Christoffersen 36-41). Barba's virtually authorless
approach positions text fairly low in the hierarchy of
theatrical values. This dramaturgy, however, enacts the most
basic of Grotowski's tenets found in Towards a Poor
Theatre: that theatre, in order to function, requires no other
elements than actors and audience; thus, the playtext is a
non-essential luxury item.
Even if this is an overstatement, it is a way to view text
(and, indeed, all instruments of theatrical production) in
isolation, without presuming its necessity, and, therefore, to
enable evaluation of each aspect of theatrical creation
(without confusing them). Each is viewed for its own unique
qualities, not so much from an aesthetic perspective as from
a methodological stance. Thus Barba's methodology enables
him and his colleagues to see better how theatre works: how
the drama and its unique components (here, character)
function not merely as structural devices but as virtual
organisms. This is what Pirandello is proposing in the
Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author when he
writes that "these characters, having by now life in their
9
veins" or that "[t]hey are detached from me; live on their
own; have acquired voice and movement" (366). A reader
knows not to take him literally, yet Pirandello was serious
about the autonomous will that the character exercises.
Similarly, Barba sees performance as a living organism:
theatrical character as organic and self-determining. Both
also acknowledge the actor's inherent autonomy. But
whereas Barba celebrates the actor's autonomy, Pirandello
appears in Six Characters to have perceived it as a threat to
authorship. Whatever Pirandello's beliefs about the
harmfulness or benignity of the actor, it is the autonomy of
the character (not the actor) that is the point of Six
Characters in Search of an Author. This is the importance
of the intellectual stance Pirandello took in the introduction
to the play and other early theoretical writings such as
"Spoken Action," "Illustrators, Actors and Translators," and
"Theatre and Literature."
Pirandello's notion of the independent will of character
was supported by the scholar and cultural critic Adriano
Tilgher, whose 1922 review of Henry IV articulated his
"life-form" theory. The theory opposes life to literary form
and postulates that life can separate itself from fixed,
immobile literary forms (Caputi 107-8). Yet in Six
Characters, life never fully escapes from the literary form.
Liberated from an unfinished novel, the six characters find
the theatre insufficient to their needs and are ultimately
doomed. Pirandello saw form as opposed to life. But for
Barba, form is alive because it is both literary and
performance-based; the confluence of life and form makes
the two mutually dependent. Tilgher ultimately renounced
Pirandello's work, and it may be that Pirandello never fully
accepted Tilgher's life-form theory. It is possible that lifeform can be construed not as dichotomy but, rather, as
synthesis of life and form such that they become one, as
Barba has it in his work.
The strange experience of watching Varley's
performance leads to deeper understanding of the issues
Pirandello addressed in Six Characters and his related
theoretical stance. Pirandello wrote, "Through the miracle
of art, characters should step out from the written pages of
the play, alive in their own right, just as the Lord of Blaye
and the Countess of Tripoli stepped down from that ancient
tapestry" ("Spoken Action" 21). Julia Varley turns this
theoretical stance into a matter of theatrical knowledge:
Dona Musica steps out of one performance, Kaosmos, and
into one of her own making, Dona Musica's Butterflies.
In collaboration with Barba, Varley takes the discourse
on character to a different level with Dona Musica's
Butterflies. Varley says of the character that Dona Musica's
identity has "a tendency to exist." She writes, "When I,
Dona Musica, a character, met the actress, I made myself
known but not understood." This meeting with the character
parallels the crisis in Six Characters in which the actors
meet the characters but cannot fully grasp the magnitude of
their story. But, as an actor, Varley is much more
sympathetic with her character; after all, they share the same
body.
In describing the way the characters in Six Characters
"live on their own; have acquired voice and movement,"
Pirandello affirms their "[p]ossibilities of being" in much
the same way that Varley affirms Dona Musica's tendency
to exist (Preface 366, 367). They differ most in what
Pirandello deems "the character's raison d' etre" (Preface
The word organism contains the meaning of
organic, living. For human beings life is attained
through the capacity of breathing. But we cannot
say that a performance, as organism,
automatically breathes...The great miracle or
mystery is that the actors make this Frankenstein
we call the performance come alive. Not only
does the performance breathe, but it has a will of
its own which makes it move in unexpected
directions, no longer bound to our intentions: a
sort of savage which is nevertheless disciplined.
(qtd. in Baumrin, "My Grandfather" 44)
How far can the theatre go to liberate and give actual, not
virtual, life to a character? This is what Pirandello explored
in Six Characters and what Barba and Varley now take to
another, perhaps more theatrical, level in their Dona
Musica's Butterflies.
At the La Mama E.T.C. Annex, in New York City, on
29 October 1999, Julia Varley performed Dona Musica's
Butterflies. An old woman with flowing white hair sits at a
dressing table and explains how she came into being. She is
surrounded by a circle of tightly crimped white fabric
carefully arranged on the stage floor, with white candles set
on the cloth at equidistant points around the circle. Dona
Musica explains how a butterfly emerges from a chrysalis as
she makes butterflies out of note-paper and cloth
handkerchiefs. Her songs and dances might be considered
unbecoming for a woman her age. About half of her text is
sung in a wavering operatic oratorio manque. She tells no
story other than the one that explains how she came into
existence for another, earlier Odin production, Kaosmos
(1993-1996), a larger work with eight actors based on the
writings of Hans Christian Andersen, Franz Kafka, and
Rudyard Kipling. At the performance of Dona Musica's
Butterflies, spectators' expectations of theatrical fiction are
frustrated as Dona Musica describes how a character
created for one performance has contrived to create her own
performance out of a seeming restlessness with unresolved
issues stemming from her creation in the first performance.
Dona Musica's Butterflies is oddly Pirandellian
metatheatre: one play's character, in a new performance of
her own making, is conscious of the actor's paradoxical
position of character-within-actor-within-individual-person.
The work then goes beyond the paradox to explore the
character's autonomous realm when liberated from the first
play.
Barba's ability to surgically dissect performance
methodology, isolate tiny aspects of the process of theatrical
creation, and then reconstruct these smaller bits into
performances positions him on a small patch of common
ground with Pirandello. Both Barba and Pirandello view
10
368). For Pirandello, the drama is their raison d' etre
because the characters claim it is the only forum for their
voices (especially since they lack an author). In other
words, they desert the book for the stage. Only in the theatre
can the six characters' tragic-story be told, but the theatre
does not welcome them. Dona Musica's relationship with
the theatre is more complex, perhaps because she has a
more intimate understanding of the process of theatrical
creation through her actor. Luckily, she is not hostile to the
actor and director: Dona Musica negotiates with her actor,
whereas the characters in Six Characters argue with the
actors and the manager. Pirandello's purpose may have been
to demonstrate that actors in Italy at the time were ill
equipped to portray such characters, but the implication is
that actors in general are intellectually capable of little more
than egotism. In Dona Musica's Butterflies, character, actor,
and director come to an understanding. Though Dona
Musica resists the director, as any actor might resist a
director, his concerns ultimately become hers.
The conflict between an absent writer's creations and
the actors is the structural basis for Six Characters. Nothing
the actors do is good enough for the characters, who
selfishly demand to play themselves. But Varley, in the
character of Dona Musica, speaks of her collaborators with
empathy:
Perhaps Pirandello's investigation of the autonomy of
character in Six Characters was limited by his
understandable reluctance, at the time, to accept the actor's
art as legitimate creation. He viewed it as translation.
Although Pirandello was quite close to the actors with
whom he worked, his author-centered contextualization of
the actor's work as mere translation was by no means
playful, nor couched in ironic humor, and today it seems to
indicate a distrust of the profession bordering on hostility.
Later in his career, especially in light of his collaboration
with the actor Marta Abba, his view of the actor's art
softened.
Pirandello's changed view of the actor probably also
stemmed from his appreciation for Eleanora Duse, though
she disappointed him by never accepting a role in his plays
(Bini 17). This changed view of the actor occurred well
after Six Characters, specifically while writing plays for
Marta Abba. But it appears that the impulse to write for
such an actor derived from his desire to write for Duse, with
whom he shared a theory of performance. Both Duse and
Pirandello felt that characters were the creations of an
author and that, therefore, actors owed a responsibility to
the author when performing his or her work. Autonomous as
Pirandello's characters were, they still exerted the author's
will, whereas Varley does not feel an author's absence.
Pirandello's work with Abba on the 1926 production Diana
e La Tuda illustrates this essential difference between his
own approach and that of Barba and Varley. Daniela Bini
asserts that Pirandello wrote the play "for" Abba, who was
his muse and not a collaborator in any authorial sense (41).
In the Barba/Varley approach, the actor exercises her
autonomy, whereas Pirandello scripted both Abba's
characters and her professional identity, losing the woman
herself to a more general notion of woman's autonomy,
ironically scripted by the male author(ity).
Pirandello's view of the actor mirrored Duse's
approach to acting, which was based on what Eva Le
Gallienne calls "self-naughting," or nullification of the self
(166). Pirandello calls Duse's approach a "supreme
renunciation of the self' ("Art of Duse" 381). Selfnullification does not enable character autonomy: indeed, it
ruptures the liminal boundary that separates actor from
character by rejecting an actor's professional identity.
Exactly the opposite is true in Varley and Barba's work: the
self (the actor's professional identity) is an essential part of
all their work. (2) In Dona Musica's Butterflies there is no
subjugation of the woman as actor or character to culturally
inscribed roles. If gender remains constructed for
Pirandello, Barba looks beyond culturally constructed
identities to create characters anew. The characters slip off
the bonds of gender to seek personal—rather than
material—truth. Thus characters need not force spectators
to gaze through the lens of the middle-class values that
Strindberg and Brecht renounced.
Susan Bassnett and Jennifer Lorch suggest that
Pirandello's early attitude toward actors is understandable
not only because it is symptomatic of Italian theatre reforms
but, specifically, because he entered the theatre as a man of
Listening to [the] melody I, Dona Musica, took
my first steps. I discovered the movement of my
arms, the postures of my body and the possible
positions of my head...But the director was not
satisfied. One day he would ask me to slow
down, the next day to move even slower and the
next day to be faster. To please him I contrived to
behave without it being possible to recognize the
rhythm...In this way also my actress put on stage
that flowing and becoming of which she had
read.
Dona Musica has made the director an offstage character in
the work. Towards the end of the work she says,
The director had said to the actress: I would like
you to do a very old character. Julia bought the
wig and found in her father's attic a night-dress
in black silk and a silver embroidered Arab cape.
One day she got dressed and made her face up
with grey and white to surprise the director. She
wanted him to see his grandmother again with her
long loose white hair, that image of little girl and
old lady that he described in his book The Paper
Canoe.
Through Dona Musica, Varley shows her plan to fulfill the
director's artistic imagination. Dona Musica speaks of her
actress in the possessive, much the same way an author
might speak of her character. Ironically, both author and
character somehow possess the actor as autonomous agent
of theatrical creation.
11
letters who expected the actor to be a "faithful translator" of
the text, owing the text as much responsibility as the author
deserved (9). His views echo the late-nineteenth-century
Italian attitude toward commedia dell'arte, expressed by
essayist Matilde Serao (a confidant of Duse's), who deemed
it a thousand steps backward along the path of art,
"wayward improvisation by bright actors who have no
desire to follow the thoughts of [...] the author [...
Commedia promoted] the substitution of the personal
consciousness of the actor for the certainly higher and
nobler consciousness of the author" (8). Lorch believes that
"Pirandello himself is the heir to such assumptions" (135).
It is little wonder that, in such an environment, Pirandello
was suspicious of the actor as an autonomous agent of
creation.
This position made it difficult for Pirandello to see
why his characters were not expressed, nor fully
expressible, in the theatre. In Six Characters he suggests a
reality much more of the characters' making than of his own,
one he deems unavailable to the actor in his or her process
of rehearsing and performing. Pirandello is ultimately
giving up on actors without thoroughly examining their
overall creative process to discover how they, more than
authors, can expose a complexity of character that goes
beyond the text. But, beyond self-nullification (which is a
highly suspicious technical feat), Pirandello did not
investigate those elements of the great actor that makes him
or her a creator rather than a translator. On a theoretical
level, Pirandello proposes that the characters' truth is too
complex for actors; at the end of Six Characters, the actors
are baffled by the characters. The actors' attitude is summed
up by the manager's "To hell with it all!" (276). Theatre's
abdication of its responsibility to the character evinces a
sense of hopelessness on Pirandello's part regarding the
actor's (and therefore the theatre's) ability to expose the
deepest truths of literary creation.
Whereas Pirandello was struggling against fixed
tradition, Barba has reexamined theatrical tradition to
harvest a methodology that is as old as it is new. Odin
Teatret is more like what Pirandello's generation was
renouncing: the pre-unification, close-knit-family touring
companies whose cohesion was more characteristic of
religious zeal than of professional commitment (Lorch 129).
But the Odin is also a benefactor of and influenced by the
theatre reforms enacted in the early twentieth century, albeit
more by Russia and Northern Europe's little theatres than by
Italy's Teatro Stabile.
In Barba's work, it is not the author's subtext but what
he and Varley call the actor's "subscore" (a performer's
inner life, the complex lacework of thoughts and impulses
that motivate her actions) that is the key to characters' raison
d'etre. The subscore contains aspects of both the actor and
the character; it is their meeting ground. Varley's actor's
subscore is described as follows: "The director's briefing
was for realistic scenes and an elderly character, while my
actress is thinking of infinity, of how she could make a
character similar to the sea gone with the sun." But Dona
Musica has a very different inner world, and, like
Pirandello's six characters, a much more disturbing story
than the actor's. Dona Musica says,
Once upon a time there was an obedient and
sensitive child who loved butterflies. He ran after
them and took them delicately in his small rosy
chubby hands and then, gracefully, he would pull
off their wings. One day his mother saw him:
"Aren't you ashamed, harming such a defenseless
creature?" And the child protested: "butterflies
like it."
This is not the story of Dona Musica's Butterflies, but
the truth Dona Musica carries embedded in her identity. The
truth of Dona Musica travels beyond the boundaries of the
performance to the realm of existence—actual existence—
to the ontology of the butterfly, who (like a character) lives
but a day (only long enough for the performance of her
wings). What is the meaning of that existence? Whereas the
characters in Six Characters seem satisfied to baffle and
unnerve the manager and the actors, Dona Musica
internalizes the world of her actress, her director, and her
audience to express the wondrous elusive nature of life itself
- albeit in the figure of a seemingly mad, toothless, crooked
old woman childishly obsessed with butterflies. Perhaps this
is what Grotowski meant when he described his work as
"existential naturalism" (206-7).
Regardless of their disparities, both Barba and
Pirandello are serious when they question the notion of
character in the theatre. Rather than attempt to do away with
it in a Strindbergian vision of "characterless" theatre
(something Strindberg himself never did), Barba and
Pirandello are led by the characters they meet, characters
whose paternity may be in question, into the uncomfortable
human, existential questions that theatre, ancient and
contemporary, traditionally engages. Whereas Pirandello
allows the actor/character schism to speak for itself, Barba
and Varley plumb the chasm's depths to discover theatre's
deepest levels of meaning, and, here, the human penchant
for cruelty at the center of the drama. Dona Musica's story
of the obedient little boy addresses the horror surrounding
the implied incest, the drowning of the baby, and the suicide
of the stepbrother at the end of Six Characters.
"Aren't you ashamed, harming such a defenseless
creature?" "Butterflies like it."
Seth Baumrin. “No Longer in Search of an Author, a
Character Defines Herself: Pirandello's Six Characters in
Search of an Author and Eugenio Barba's Experimental
Performance Methodology.” (Summer 2001). Modern
Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, v.44 i2
p.174(15).
12
NOTES
Lorch, Jennifer. "Setting the Scene: Theater in Italy Before
Pirandello." A Companion to Pirandello Studies. Ed. John
Louis DiGaetani. New York: Greenwood, 1991. 125-43.
1.
In order to produce such departures from convention,
many of Italy's theatre traditions would have to fade—
especially the regionalism and paralinguistic grunting of
commedia and the restrictions inherent in touringcompany role hierarchy.
2. Professional identity can be defined as an identity that
accompanies each actor throughout all of his or her
work, a professional ethos. See Baumrin, "Eugenio
Barba" 220.
Pirandello, Luigi. "The Art of Duse." Colombian Monthly
1.7 (1928): 381.
—"Illustrators, Actors and Translators." Bassnett and
Lorch, Luigi Pirandello 23-34.
—Naked Masks: Five Plays by Luigi Pirandello. Trans and
ed. Eric Bentley. New York: Dutton, 1952.
WORKS CITED
—Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author. 1925.
Naked Masks 363-75.
Bassnett, Susan, and Jennifer Lorch. (1993). “Introduction”.
Bassnett and Lorch, ed. Luigi Pirandello 1-17. Luigi
Pirandello in the Theatre: A Documentary Record. Chur,
Switzland: Harwood,.
—Six Characters in Search of an Author. 1921. Naked
Masks 211-76.
—"Spoken Action." Bassnett and Lorch, Luigi Pirandello
20-23.
Baumrin, Seth. (2000). "Eugenio Barba and the Stanislavski
Legacy: An Ontology of the Actor." Diss. City University of
New York Graduate Center.
—"Theatre and Literature." Bassnett and Lorch, Luigi
Pirandello 47-51.
— "My Grandfather Konstantin Sergeievich: Interview
with Eugenio Barba." Mime Journal 1998/1999:28-51.
Rasmussen, Iben. Itsi Bitsi. Unpublished script, 1992. N.
pag.
Bini, Daniela. Pirandello and His Muse: The Plays for
Marta Abba. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1998.
Strindberg, August. "Author's Foreword [to Miss Julie.] Six
Plays of Strindberg. Trans. Elizabeth Sprigge. New York:
Avon, 1965.61-73.
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Trans. John Willett.
New York: Hill, 1964.
Varley, Julia. Dona Musica's Butterflies. Unpublished
script, 1997. N. pag.
—"Short Organum for the Theatre." Brecht on Theatre 179205.
—"The Modern Theatre is the Epic Theatre." Brecht on
Theatre 33-42.
Named Works:
Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore (Play).
Caputi, Anthony. Pirandello and the Crisis of Modern
Consciousness. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988.
Christoffersen, Erik Exe. The Actor's Way. Trans. Richard
Fowler. London: Routledge, 1993.
Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. Ed. Eugenio
Barba. Kent: Methuen, 1984.
Holt, Marion Peter. Introduction. Antonio Buero-Vallejo:
Three Plays. New York: Trinity UP, 1985. vii-xxi.
Le Gallienne, Eva. The Mystic in the Theatre: Eleanora
Duse. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1973.
Lope de Vega. Acting is Believing [Lo fingido verdadero].
Trans. Michael McGaha. San Antonio, TX: Trinity UP,
1986.
13
George Bernard Shaw, in a letter to his biographer, went
further in elucidating Shakespeare’s art. In King Lear, he
says, “we find the alternation of tragic and funny dropped
for an actual interweaving of the two; so that we have the
tragic and the comic simultaneously, each heightening the
other with poignancy otherwise unattainable.”3 In
separating “alternation” from “interweaving” Shaw catches
an essential distinction between tragicomedy and what I
would call “the comic agony” in plays, between what
Johnson means by “successive evolutions in the design” and
what Shaw calls simultaneous interweaving of comic and
tragic threads in a fabric that is iridescent, indebted to both
their colorings yet unlike either one. In his essay, “TragiComedy,” Eric Bentley adverts to more or less the same mix
when he refers to “that comedy which is infused with gloom
and ends badly, that tragedy which is shot through with a
comedy that only makes the outlook still bleaker.”4
In the modern era Pirandello did not initiate the comic
agony. Ibsen, Shaw, Wedekind, Chekhov, and others had
already employed it on the stage. But he became its most
dogged and influential practitioner, mostly because he
encased a tragic or melodramatic inner play performed only
in fragments, within a comic or farcical outer play, and
showed it striving to break out. Emperor Henry has an
unusual pattern. As visitors to the villa and as observers,
Countess Matilda and Baron Belcredi occupy the outer
drama. But they both belonged to the original triangle, with
“Henry;” before and during the incidents at the carnival.
When the quarrel erupts in the third act, culminating in the
killing of the Baron, the inner drama implicates the two of
them as it explodes into the outer one. In Right You Are and
Six Characters the “outer” players form a distinct and
impressionable onstage audience for those trapped in the
inner one. Some of them make it difficult for us, as a second
tier of spectators, to appreciate the agony of the inner play
without at the same time being amused by their
inappropriate responses and interpretations, their opaquely
comic filterings.
The incomplete inner. drama of Right You Are, the
tragic knot that binds that black-clad Ponza and his wife
(who might be awaiting their own funeral, which is also the
partial enactment of their lives) to Signora Frola, is, in
effect, demeaned by the inquisitiveness of the onstage
audience, that twentieth-century school for scandal, the
Agazzis and their guests; and it is further disfigured by
Laudisi’s interfering comments and his chortling, which the
playwright exactly repeats with four snorts of laughter at the
end of each act. In Six Characters, as we witness the tragic
plight of the six unfortunates, two of them also garbed in
black, we find that plight similarly tamed and given a comic
gloss by the actors who mimic it and the director who would
reshape it for popular consumption. “Henry;” s&thing with
the anguished memories of his past, has willfully
imprisoned himself in the fate of a medieval ruler and
forfeited his identity; but he plays games with his four
“knights” and becomes, in his turn, the plaything of a
psychiatric terror (with the first name of Dionysos and “a
fine, satyr’s face”), whose shock treatment has a calamitous
The Comic Agony in Pirandello
By Albert Bermel
...I love
The sight of agony, and the sense of joy,
When this shall be another’s, and that mine...
- Count Cenci in Shelley’s The Cenci
At the close of the overnight conversation reported in
The Symposium Socrates, stimulated rather than blunted by
his intake of wine and by the onset of dawn, is addressing
himself to Agathon the tragedian and Aristophanes, the
supreme creator of farcical comedy, insisting that “the man
who knew how to write a comedy could also write a
tragedy, and [that a skillful tragic writer was capable of
being also a comic writer.”1 The two poets do not dispute
his claim, very likely because the wine and the hour have hit
them harder and they are on the brink of sleep. In Plato’s
account (taken from Apollodorus, who had it from
Aristodemus) Socrates doesn’t go onto propose that a comic
or a tragic playwright might concoct a drama that would be
at the same time comic and tragic; and neither of his groggy
listeners, from what we know of their work, would later
attempt such an experiment in dramatic miscegenation.
But tragedies that are also comedies strike us today as
being anything but startling, for they have become the
dominant mode in twentieth-century writing not only of
plays but also of prose fiction and poetry. They differ from
the Italian and French Renaissance and early Baroque tragicomedy, in which a “serious” action slides away from a
tragic ending or a comic action turns unexpectedly sour; in
either case, the prevailing tone, the tragic or comic mood,
switches into its opposite, and unless the playwright
transposes with uncommon discretion, the result may appear
awkward, as if the last part of the work has been tacked on.
From much of Shakespeare and subsequent drama the term
tragicomedy acquired another connotation: that a play given
this label keeps switching direction. A funny scene or
moment precedes a dismal or disastrous one, which in turn
leads to more merriment. This process needs not happen
with mechanical precision. A final tally may show two
comic scenes for every four “straight” ones. But the
switching from mood to mood or tone to tone, back and
forth, persists through the action.
Samuel Johnson had something like this switching in
mind when he defended the art of Shakespeare, who “has
united the powers of exciting laughter and sorrow not only
in one mind but in one composition. Almost all his plays are
divided between serious and ludicrous characters, and, in
the successive evolutions of the design, sometimes produce
seriousness and sorrow, and sometimes levity and
laughter.”2 Johnson added that “this is a practice contrary to
the rules of criticism,” but he approved of such a practice if
it led to Shakespearean theatre. Nearly two centuries later
14
outcome. The offhanded and metaphorical farewell bidden
by the Man with the Flower in His Mouth, as he finishes
talking, talking, talking through his instrument of doom and
takes care to dodge his too-loving wife (another figure in
black), has a grotesquely comic flavor that may evoke
nervous laughs as he bitterly makes light of his condition—
of the pathos of his one-character inner drama.5
Pirandello, though, seldom receives the tribute he
merits as a comic writer. I would put forward four principal
reasons for the neglect. First, much criticism dwells on his
training and doctorate in German philosophy and on his
remark that he had “the misfortune to belong” in the ranks
of “philosophical writers.”6 On the assumption that
philosophers, in their search for eternal verities, or even a
nugget or two of stopgap wisdom, shed their sense of
humor—the examples of Socrates, Nietzsche, and scores of
others notwithstanding—the criticism in question shies
away from this author’s structural comedy. Second, the
characters from the inner dramas portray themselves with
such passion that their tragic intensity may overpower the
comic infusions of the outer drama, especially when the
inner roles are performed with the Sicilian vehemence that
marks their dialogue and the directives from the author.
Third, the later moments of each of these plays incorporate
an act or revelation that leaves both audiences, onstage and
off, stunned and apprehensive. After the speech of Signora
Ponza in Right You Are and after the deaths (one a
presumed suicide) in Six Characters and the murder in
Emperor Henry, the agony prevails: we’d feel almost
profane if we released a smile or a laugh. Fourth, a
traditional comedy or farce ends in a resolution of sorts; the
dramatist leaves us with the conviction that there is nothing
further to say. But a tragedy generally ends as a gaping
wound; far from having resolved itself, the conclusion
provokes questions; the action remains disturbingly
incomplete. Each of these three plays even leaves both
audiences—us and the one onstage, our distorting mirror—
wondering what actually happened in the inner drama.
Some secret that might reconcile the conflicts hangs in the
air like a challenge.
In any event, the comedy will make itself felt.
Pirandello’s plays deal in large part with the refusal of some
characters—some human beings—to comprehend the
sufferings of others; and while the sufferings will be
blatantly visible and audible, so will the incomprehension
which, as it arises from time to time, puts the suffering at a
remove and confers on it a layer of comic callousness.
Lamberto Laudisi personifies this callousness. He remains
onstage more persistently than any of the other characters.
He starts out as a humanitarian, who sympathizes with
Ponza and makes fun of the chorus of observers in the
Agazzi household as they pursue their quest for an elusive,
possibly unknowable truth; but he also revels in their
perplexity, entertaining us when he chastises their altogether
natural curiosity over the curious inner drama. He even
prolongs the ordeal of Ponza and Signora Frola by coming
up with the idea of interrogating Ponza’s wife. Laudisi, who
admits that he himself enjoys listening to gossip, is a spirit
of mischief; he puckishly delights in playing up to an
audience, even when he stands alone in front of a mirror
and, for the benefit of the auditorium alone, asks his
reflection which of the two of them is mad. For him, acting
is being.
Here we run into another paradoxical matter in
Pirandello’s theater. The tragic characters wear masks of
one kind or another which would seem to fix or “type”
them; the comic characters (with a few exceptions, such as
Laudisi) do not; yet, the former are more pliable and richer
as roles. Pirandello suggests actual masks for the Six
Characters—a suggestion rarely followed in practice—and
specifies a “fundamental sentiment” for each of the four
adult masks, but as the action continues the wearers do not
conform to the restrictions of those masked expressions,
while the unmasked members of the acting troupe behave
conventionally, if not predictably. Neither “Henry” nor
Matilda sports a literal mask, but he has applied “very
obvious” makeup to his cheeks and has dyed his hair at the
front and sides in a futile effort to preserve the illusion that
he is still only twenty-six, and she uses “violent” cosmetics
that give her “the haughty head of a Valkyrie.” The text
offers no clear signal of how she now feels about “the
Emperor,” except that she was fascinated enough by her
remembrance of him to have come back to see him again,
and her motives remain clouded throughout. He, volatile in
the extreme, rocks between past and present, Germany and
Italy, monarch and commoner, raving and oratorical
lucidity. We cannot be sure that he did recover his sanity, as
he alleges, twelve years after his accident, but nor can we
know that he was ever certifiably insane. Has he persisted
consciously with performance after performance, drawn out
a twenty-year run of his bravura act, “perpetuating,” as
Belcredi says, “the unhappy joke of a carnival day”?
“Henry”s instability, his array of feelings (his multiplicity of
“masks”) during any one scene, constitutes the kernel of the
play’s inner drama. To hold the role together, to find a sort
of architecture for it, means coping with one of the trickiest
characterizations in the modem theatre.
Signora Frola, another “mask” at first, if we judge her
by the “sweet smile that is constantly on her lips,” also
explores a range of emotions. Ponza, introduced as “almost
fierce-looking,” fluctuates from deference to defiance, from
rage at being spied upon to extravagant tenderness toward
his mother-in-law. His wife, the most masked of all
Pirandello’s characters, the apex of the tragic triangle in
Right You Are, enters wearing a “thick veil, black,
impenetrable,” and does not lift it; yet, in her brief
appearance, from her opening silence to her ten or so lines,
she embodies the imponderable. We learn nothing from her
or about her. She is “no one.. . To myself—I am the one
that each of you thinks I am,” utterly indeterminate, a
creature of infinite latency
Because of the fluidity of their roles, the “inner”
characters not only change as we perceive them but also
take part in shifting interactions. We cannot gauge with any
confidence how they feel about one another from one
instant to the next, much less how they will feel in their
15
encounters to come. Spectators at the initial performances in
Italy and elsewhere didn’t hesitate to vent their bafflement
over these uncertainties. They wanted readily identifiable
characters engaged in relationships that were recognizable,
clearcut. Pirandello, however, had put before them figures
who floated free of definition, ambiguous entities in
comparison with the meticulously planned, almost
compartmentalized, roles they had grown accustomed to.7
An attentive theatergoer is bound to entertain further
doubts—about the background material, the part of the
unenacted story that precedes the action and is reported
during the action. Some of this material involves clashes of
information that help to impel the drama, such as the dispute
over whether Lina/Julia is the first or second wife of Ponza.
Other batches of material seem designed to withhold or
suppress or disguise information, to tease us by omission.
How did the trio manage to survive the selective earthquake
that destroyed the village in which they were living, all the
buildings, all the records, all their relatives? Were they
away from home at the time? In an earthquake shelter? We
are not told that they so much as suffered minor injuries or
inhaled quantities of dust. Afterward, if Ponza wished to
protect his privacy; why did he place his mother-in-law in
the apartment next to Agazzi, his employer and
interlocutor?
The Countess has been a widow “for many years,” but
we are never told whom she married after she refused
“Henry;” perhaps a count from whom she takes her title,
though his name is never mentioned. Does “Henry,” who
has not seen her for twenty years, think she married the
Baron, whom she keeps in tow as a lover and also as a butt
for her mockery? Did the Baron cause the accident with the
horse? “Henry” says so—nobody else confirms it—and he
has evidently nursed his revenge for twenty years, but is it
revenge for his fail and derangement or for having lost the
Countess to this rival? Or both?
Signora Ponza declares that “the truth” is “simply this.
I am Signora Frola’s daughter...And I am Signor Ponza’s
second wife... And to myself I am no one.” Do we
understand her to be saying (not at all “simply”) that she
chooses to call herself one person to the husband and
another to the mother, relinquishing her innateness in order
to sustain a precarious harmony in the three-way
relationship; or that she, or two of the three, or all of them,
are insane; or that she cannot tell an unmentionable secret?
One secret that would lend an evasive truth to her words is
that she and Ponza are sister and brother and the children of
Signora Frola.
Nor is it easy to take at face value the relationships
among the family in Six Characters, especially the
parentage of the four children.8 In this play, too, Pirandello
supplies hints but not quite enough information to suggest
incest, the taboo that arouses the ghosts of Greek tragedy. A
comparable secret that lurks behind the striking physical
likeness implied in Emperor Henry between the protagonist
and his nephew, “the young marquis” Carlo di Nolli, so that
the presence of the one in a frame can be mistaken for the
portrait of the other. Such a resemblance of nephew to
uncle, though it does not unduly strain belief, would become
even more telling if the Marquis were the son of “Henry;”
the counterpart of Frida, who, in the matching frame, plays
her mother, the Countess. But “Henry’s” siring of the
Marquis denotes incest between “Henry” and his dead
sister. That rich and inordinately selfless lady, who appears
only in the exposition, transformed her Umbrian villa into
an eleventh-century German palace to allow him to live on
in his state of royal exaltation. On her deathbed, she begged
her son to take care of him and bring people to see him,
convinced that “her beloved brother’s recovery was
imminent,” not long after he’d said “certain strange things
to her” and “shown her a most unusual tenderness,” as a
result of which she grew “extremely upset?’ And are we to
deduce any significance from the age of Frida, nineteen, in
conjunction with the carnival’s having taken place twenty
years earlier, and “Henry’s” clasping of her in the last act as
he shouts, “You are mine, mine, mine! And by right!”? If he
and the Countess were once lovers, and not only riding
partners in the cavalcade; if he therefore sees Frida, rightly
or wrongly; as his daughter, and not simply as a rejuvenated
image of the Countess; and if the Marquis’s likeness to him
is more than coincidence, incest again rears its insidious
head in the prospective marriage of the two young people.
Among the Six Characters, some accuse others of
lying: conflicting evidence once more. The Mother begs
that the story not be played out, even though she cannot
come to stage life unless it ir played out. She may feel her
part in it has been shameful in having given herself to the
Father, after he sent her to his former Secretary; and in not
acknowledging the true parentage of the four children.
Withheld information again. So is the absence of the
Secretary; already conveniently dead, like “Henry’s” sister,
and unable to contribute his story, in order that a family
secret may be safeguarded.
Suppositions like these can plunge us into deep,
turbulent waters. We may avoid them and stay on the plays’
surface by arguing that Pirandello wrote hurriedly;
carelessly, but such an assumption is always risky with a
writer of his rare caliber. In all likelihood he would have
removed any material he considered blemishes, undesirably
misleading, or superfluous, when he revised his work for the
edition from which Eric Bentley; our most enlightened
theater scholar,9 has made these versions of four of
Pirandello’s most celebrated plays. How far, then, should
the troubling ambiguities, which sharpen the agony of the
characters’ interplay, be taken into account when it comes
to a staging? If many of the lines in each play arc doubleedged, one of the edges has an innocence to it that permits
them to go almost unnoticed. Should they slip past in
performance or receive sufficient weight—but not too
much!—to permit insinuations of hidden, forbidden depths?
There is no point in prescribing one or another approach;
each decision will rest with a director and actors. But they
should be aware of the choices open to them, their
prerogatives, and the likely consequences of those choices.
Trying to sound the depths will push a production in the
direction of tragedy fostered by unconfessed guilt; trying to
16
i.e., to unfix them by raising questions about their
“form.”
8. In Contradictory Characters: An Interpretation of the
Modern Theatre (New York: Dutton, 1973) I have
pursued this question of parentage at more length. See
“The Living Statues,” 122-43.
9. His book The Pirandello Commentaries (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1986) collects Bentley’s
Pirandello criticism, which, apart from its intrinsic and
indispensable value, has inspired much writing by
subsequent critics, including this introduction.
avoid them will give the production a lighter tone and a
more rapid narrative flow that is not necessarily nearer to
comedy. I believe that each company should allow for the
darker, secret possibilities without sacrificing the comic
overlay and yet without traducing a literal reading of each
inner and outer drama. Such playing will call for a
complicated interlocking of forcefulness and subtlety But
who ever claimed that capturing the majestic, immensely
rewarding theater of Pirandello was easy?
Albert Bermel. (1991). “The Comic Agony of Pirandello.”
Pirandello’s Major Plays. Eric Bentley, trans. Albert
Bermel, forward. Evanston, Illinois; Northwestern
University Press.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Translation by Walter Hamilton in Plato: The
Symposium (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1951), 113.
Preface to Johnson’s edition of The Plays of
Shakespeare (1765). See W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., Samuel
Johnson on Shakespeare (New York: Hill and Wang,
1960), 23-69.
Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw: Man of
the Century (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1956), 471.
Chapter 10 of The Life of the Drama (New York:
Atheneum, 1964), 353.
The agony of the Man with the Flower in His Mouth is
no less affecting for being pathetic, rather than tragic.
Tragedy implies responsibility for one’s plight and
suffering; but he did not cause the cancer, did not will it
to appear and to grow. if anything, he communicates that
agony to us all the more powerfully because of his
attempt to put himself at a distance from it.
See Bentley’s translation of the Preface to Six
Characters in Naked Masks (New York: Dutton, 1952),
364-65.
The openness of Pirandello’s characters and dramatic
situations makes us look back suspiciously at the lifeversus-form antithesis propounded by Pirandello and
developed by Adriano Tilgher, the most methodical
Piranddllo
critic
among
the
playwright’s
contemporaries. In Pirandello: A Biography (London
and New York: Oxford, 1975, translated and severely
cut by Alastair Hamilton), Gaspare Giudice points out
that Tilgher’s theories impressed Pirandello himself for
a time and even influenced his later writings. Tilgher
probably owed his theory to Pirandello’s most strenuous
allusion to form in opposition to life, the statements in
Six Characters of the Father, who says that the writer
will die but his characters will live on because they are
fixed. Yes, on paper they look fixed, but Pirandello’s
and all other characters will spring to life in the theatre
unforeseeably, according to the whims of casting. As for
the fixed word in print, critics have continued to
disagree about the nature of the characters as written,
17
pretty much what it would be with an Ibsen play. It is hard
to tell the story of, say, Ghosts because it comes out in
fragments and the fragments have to be painstakingly fitted
together. The Ibsenite has, above all, to be able to take a
hint; he even has to have the detective's knack of snapping
up bits of evidence and holding them in reserve till he can
connect them with something else. However, while Ibsen's
fragments come together into a complete and coherent
picture, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, Pirandello defies
a number of the normal expectations and, by the usual
criteria, his picture is incomplete. As to location, for
instance, which in the drama, at least since Aristotle, has
always been considered something to have a clear
understanding about. In most plays one knows exactly
where everything takes place, and in plays where the
location is somewhat abstract, there is a convention to make
this abstractness acceptable to its audience. In retelling
Pirandello's story just now, however, I paused several times,
hoping to insert a phrase indicating where someone had
gone or returned to. The husband's house could be in Rome,
I suppose, but couldn't it just as easily be anywhere else
with a climate favorable to fountains? Could I even say,
"returned to the city"? Not even that; because the only clues
are a school, a house with a fountain in the garden, and a
modiste's shop that is also a brothel; things that exist in
small towns and villages as well. It is not, of course, that
one insists on naturalism, but that one cannot react without a
degree of bafflement to not knowing under what
circumstances the secretary lived with the wife in city,
town, or village; how far away he then took her; where the
bedroom in which all four slept was to be found; and so on.
But the queries as to place only lead to similar queries on
other topics, and notably time. Here at least Pirandello has
marked certain boundaries, notably the ages of the four
children. Since the legitimate son is twenty-two, and the
eldest bastard is eighteen, it follows that the transfer of the
wife from husband to lover occurred about twenty years
ago. Yet, in the Pirandellian context, how little this
arithmetic means! In Ibsen, doing such arithmetic usually
proves well worthwhile, but in Six Characters it would
never be done at all, except by such an undiscourageable
investigator as myself, willing to follow any trail. This trail
has proved a false one. In the rare instances where exact
notation of the passage of time is going to affect our sense
of drama, Pirandello does the arithmetic for us. The
reiterated statement that the secretary died "two months
ago” tells us that the death marks the beginning of the
Action that is this play, just as the father’s death marks the
beginning of the Hamlet action, and the aunt's death the
beginning of the action of Enrico IV.
Generally, time and space, in the story of the Six
Characters, are alike rather abstract and are tokens of a
pervasive abstractness. Who is the Father? The question
What does he do? is no more answered than: Where does he
live? To place him, either literally or figuratively all we can
do is remark that his vocabulary marks him as something of
an intellectual - a student of Pirandellian philosophy even and that his having a secretary and a sizable house (with
Six Characters in
Search of An Author
By Eric Bentley
A man has a wife and a male child. He also has a male
secretary. Between the wife and the secretary there arises
what the husband considers an understanding of a harmless
sort. He wants to help them in some way but whenever he
speaks to them they exchange a significant look that seems
to ask how they should receive what he says if they are not
to annoy him. But this itself annoys him. He ends up firing
the secretary. Then he sends the wife after him. In the wife's
view, he fairly throws her into the secretary's arms; and the
pair set up house together. The husband, however, does not
lose interest in the wife. His continued interest, indeed,
though he considers it "pure" (that is: asexual) is a source of
embarrassment to the former secretary. When a daughter is
born to the lovers the husband is interested in her too-more,
perhaps, even, than he had been in the wife. And when she
becomes a schoolgirl, he waits for school coming out, then
on at least one occasion seeks her out, and gives her a
present. The girl does not know who the strange gentleman
is. At a certain point the secretary can bear the whole
situation no longer, and he takes his family-there are three
children by this time-to live somewhere else, out of the
stepfather's reach. Subsequently the secretary dies. His
family of four is now destitute; they all have to sleep in the
same room. And at some point they return to the place
where the husband lived. Here the mother gets employment
as a kind of seamstress. But her employer's real interest is in
employing the daughter, now in her late teens, as a
prostitute. The dressmaker's shop is a front for a brothel.
One day the husband, a client of the establishment, presents
himself and would have taken the girl in his arms had not
the mother suddenly turned up to cry, "But it's my daughter
!” After this encounter, the husband takes his wife back into
his home, along with his three stepchildren. At the time he
is living with his own son, now in his early twenties. This
legitimate son is offended by the presence of the three
bastards, and wanders from room to room in his father's
house, feeling displaced and desolate. The three bastards
react to his hostility. The little girl, aged four, falls into
fountain in the garden and is drowned. The other child, a
fourteen year old boy, witnesses the drowning, fails to offer
any assistance, then shoots himself. The mother, who might
have been keeping an eye on the young pair, was, instead,
following her twenty-two-year-old son around the house,
begging for forgiveness. He rushes out into the garden to
escape her, and there comes upon his step-brother just at the
moment the latter watches his sister die and kills himself.
After this debacle, the older girl rushes away from home.
Left behind are father, mother, and son.
I am trying to tell the story of Sei personaggi in cerca
d'autore, or rather the story of the six characters in the play.
This is quite hard,1 and an analysis of the work might well
begin with the reasons why it is hard. The first reason is
18
rooms to wander through and a garden with a fountain in it)
marks him as well-to-do. By contrast, wife and secretary are
defined as poor, the Italian word "umile" leaving open
whether they were just of humble birth or also humble by
nature. Of the elder girl we know that poverty made her a
prostitute; and we see that she resents her father. Of the two
youngest children we learn little except that their birth was
illegitimate. The young man is so withdrawn and silent that
we can be told he is a character not fully created because
not suited to a play at all: only part of him, as it were, is
there. To say the least, then, these are people of no
particular background. We can say they are Italian, but our
evidence is only that the play is written in Italian. We can
say they are bourgeois, yet even for this the evidence is
largely negative: in our culture, the bourgeois is the norm,
and the speech of this play is normal, except for Madama
Pace, who, like lower-class New York City today, has a
Spanish accent. Incidentally, only Madama Pace has a
name. Does that make her the only character portrayed with
particularity? Hardly; her name is a symbolic one. It means
peace, and is presumably used ironically: she brings not
peace but a pair of scissors.
Plays without what are called individual characters,
with characters labeled The Father and the like, are no new
thing. They were the usual thing in the Expressionist plays
of the second decade of the century, the decade during
which the ideas for Six Characters came to Pirandello.2 Is
this an Expressionist play, then? One is certainly
encouraged to believe so by the stage direction in which the
six are introduced. All, says the author, are to wear masks
which
by itself, need not signify very much. It is a formal device
any author might choose to adopt. It would prove nothing
more than that, perhaps, he had read Strindberg. The second
feature, however, if further explored, will lead us deep into
Pirandello's play, whereupon we shall also learn that, for
him, the first feature was not lightly adopted or trivially
used.
What is Pirandello possessed by? That dramas should
present the dynamics of relationship, and not separate
individual portraits, is in the nature of the genre. But
Pirandello is an extremist in this regard. No one has made
do with so few individual traits and details of background
while managing to make the contact between people so
electric. This kind of drama, one is tempted to say is ALL
relationship and NO character. Six Non-Characters in
Search of an Author! Or, translating this from negative to
positive: In Search of an Author, these relationshipsMan/Wife, Father/Daughter, Mother/Son. There can be
little doubt what Pirandello is possessed by: elemental
family relationships. Our next questions, then, should be: If
he has not offered us a cold typicality but has brought
relationships to passionate life, how has he done it? If he
has not approached these relationships in the accepted,
naturalistic way, how has he approached them? And now
our queries are turning back on themselves, for Pirandello's
method has already been touched on, and is that of dreams,
not the dreams of the older literary tradition, either, but the
actual fantasies of our actual day and night dreaming. And
here it would be well to limit the word "phantasy" to the
technical sense given it by Freud when he said, "Phantasies
are psychical facades constructed to bar the way to . . .
memories" of primal scenes.3 (Like Freud's translator, I will
spell the word with "ph" when this sense is intended.) This
may be only one kind of fantasy among many, but it is
amazing how close to the principal images and thoughts of
Six Characters Freud's definition brings us.
In this play we are never far away from primal scenes,
and specifically three of them: incest of father with
daughter; the child seeing the parents make love; and sibling
murder. Each of these scenes is veiled by at least one layer
of phantasy. Even the sibling murder, which comes closest
to such a scene, is not actually a murder: the boy refrained
from preventing a drowning. In the case of the incest, two
layers of phantasy at once present themselves. The girl is
not a daughter but a step-daughter, and the love-making
does not quite take place. The most thoroughly hidden of
the three primal scenes is that of the son seeing his father in
the role of lover; and how strong was Pirandello's wish to
hide this scene is shown in the fact that he deleted from later
editions this passage from the first:
will help to give the impression of figures
constructed by art, each one unchangeably fixed
in the expression of its own fundamental
sentiment, thus: REMORSE in the case of the
Father: REVENGE in the case of the
Stepdaughter; DISDAIN in the case of the Son;
GRIEF in the case of the Mother, who should
have wax tears fixed in the rings under her eyes
and on her cheeks, as with the sculpted and
painted images of the mater dolorosa in church.
Here we are being offered abstract qualities as characters, as
in those medieval moralities which are the ancestors of
Expressionist drama. But the fact is that the stage direction
does little to prepare us for what is offered by way of
character in the dialogue itself - not abstract qualities or
general ideas but emotional conflict of very unusual
vividness, vivacity, and fullness. The word "Expressionism"
is not the clue we need.
What is? Perhaps, the phrase: "dream play." Some of
the earliest critics of Pirandello's plays noticed that, in them,
"life is a dream." Two features, more than anything else,
contributed to this impression: first, the "dreamlike"
comings and goings to and from nowhere of Pirandello's
people; second, that the author seems haunted, "possessed,"
by these people. Now the first of these features, appearing
Hasn't he [it is the Son, speaking of the Fatherj
acted in such a way as to force me to discover
what no son should ever discover? That father
and mother are alive and are man and woman, for
each other, outside the reality we give them. For
as soon as this reality is uncovered, our life is no
longer tied to that man and that woman except at
19
a single point—one which will only shame them
should we see it.
Because, finally, the drama is all in this: when
the mother re-enters my home, the family she had
elsewhere, which was now being, as it were,
superimposed on the first one, comes to an end,
it's alien, it can't grow in this soil. The little girl
dies, the little boy comes to a tragic end, the
older girl flees. And so, after all the torment,
there remain we three - myself, the mother, the
son. And when the alien family is gone, we too
find ourselves alien, the one to the other. We find
ourselves utterly desolated.
A single point. One touches one's parents at the moment one
is conceived. There, for the one and only time, as the
parental genitals touch, are all three of us touching. It is the
only togetherness life affords. Such is the painfully vivid
Pirandellian version of this primal scene. It links the Old
Testament shame at the sight of parental nakedness with the
Pascalian sense of hopeless isolation in an alien universe.
The specific veils the scene wears are also of interest. First,
this Son has not discovered anyone making love. What he
has done is notice the erotic quality in a relationship he did
not expect to be erotic. It was not that of his father and
mother. It was that of his father and his stepsister. But the
suspicion is—and it is not the suspicion of the son alone—
that the step-sister is taking the mother's place in bed.
A psychoanalyst, Dr. Charles Kligerman, has made an
observation that digs deeper into the plot of Six Characters
than anything, so far as I know, that purely literary critics
have said. It is that we have here not an assortment but a
sequence of phantasies, each more primitive than the last—
each belonging to an earlier phase of our lives than the last.
In other words, from adult father/daughter incest there is a
retreat to the earlier Oedipal triangle, and then a sudden
regression to the primitive sibling rivalry, with wishful
phantasy of murder followe by guilty suicide. 4
The dramatist cannot be content merely to present
phantasies (or fantasies either), he must arrange them in
significant progression. It is Dr. Kligerman's thesis, I take it,
that the three main phantasies constitute a dramatic
beginning, middle, and end. The question is: of what? That
they make up the beginning, middle, and the end of the six
characters' own story is pretty clear. Does that make them
the beginning, middle, and end of the whole work? Rather
naturally giving psychology priority over dramatic art, our
psychoanalytic interpreter seems to answer this in the
affirmative, and backs up his answer with biographical
rather than artistic evidence. "The Father, Son and Boy,"
says Dr. Kligerman, "all represent different levels of
conflict within the author." This may well be a true
statement on the sources of the matter presented. It does not
follow that the three characters, once created, are best
considered as three aspects of one character. All the
characters a playwright “creates” come out of himself, just
as his dreams do, and may similarly correspond to parts of
himself. The important thing, artistically, is that they then
become objectified, and demand to be seen not as aspects of
their author but as his creations. If this is true, our
protagonist in Six Characters has real others (not himself in
other forms) to act upon and be acted upon by. This is a
man and his son, not a man and himself, though,
biologically and symbolically, a man and his son are
overlapping categories.
And the end of the family story is not, as I think Dr.
Kligerman assumes, the death of the two children, but the
situation that ensues thereon. It is described thus in the first
edition:
The Father is given these words toward the end of Act One.
5 Later Pirandello must have concluded both that the
passage comes at the wrong place and that it is too explicit.
He put it off to the very end of the play and did the job
without words: the final version states in a stage direction
that father, mother, and son are left on stage at the end when
the daughter rushes out of their home. They form a tableau
with the mother's arms outstretched toward the obdurate
son. Which I take to mean that the death of the two children
is not the final phantasy. Rather, the dramatist insists on
returning to the ,Oedipal image: the family story begins and
ends with father, mother, and son. The daughter and two
younger children came and went. Their father had gone
forever just before we meet them. The second family is
killed off. We see the effect upon the first family which lives
on, bearing the brunt.
So far I have been talking exclusively of the six
characters' story, which is complete (as complete as it is
going to be) before the show starts: it is all time past. Does
nothing happen on stage except a re-enactment of this past?
Does nothing happen before our eyes and now, for the first
time, in the present? Certainly it does. The six characters
enter a theatre and ask the Director to make a play of them.
He toys with the idea, finds himself, indeed, devoting the
day to trying it out. A negative decision is reached, and that
is the end. The first edition actually closes with the line, and
it is a very good curtain line: "E mi hanno fatto perdere una
giornata!"—"And they've made me lose a whole day.” 5
I am describing now, of course, the conceit or trovata
which gave the play fame, and even notoriety, the idea of an
encoutiter between a company of actors and the roles they
might be asked to play. Can it be disposed of lightly? "The
plot of the play within a play," Dr. Kligerman says,
"contains the essential drama, for the rest is comic badinage
and a great deal of discussion..."If valid, this would be a
devastating criticism: no dramatic masterpiece would have
so much dead wood in it. Conversely, if this is a great play,
expressive in all its parts, then both the "badinage" and the
"great deal of discussion" will be found to be necessary to
its structure. Let us look further into the matter.
Drama is action. "An encounter between a company of
actors and the roles they might play": this is a formula for
action, but as it stands it is too general. Action has to be
more specific than that. Who is doing what to whom? We
have always to come to this question. Take the first bit of it
20
first: who is doing? It needs hardly a moment's reflection on
Six Characters in Search of an Author to produce an answer
that comes from an overpowering impression. The Father is
doing. If an Action is here being propelled forward by a
character, then that propeller is the Father. He is indeed so
maniacally insistent that he might seem at times to be lifting
the play up bodily. His insistency is a huge motif, and a
huge portion of the play. What is he doing? He is
demanding that his drama be staged. Why? He is persuaded
that he will be rejected, a friendly one endorsed. Does he
really believe this? It is hard to say. He is so intent on
stressing what should be, it is hard to know if he is
confident that it will be. If he gets nowhere, will he settle for
less? It looks very much as if the less that he will settle for
is the act of pleading itself. He evidently gets a release from
just talking, from unburdening himself. He is, among other
things, an Ancient Mariner, buttonholing people and
inflicting his story on them. And one knows what
satisfaction all Ancient Mariners get from this kind of thing,
because every one of us is something of an Ancient
Mariner. For this mariner, certainly saying his piece is a
matter of life and death. I am reminded of a patient cited in
R. D. Laing's book The Divided Self as saying that he talked
as an act of self- preservation. That is to imply that his
existence was threatened. And the sense of such a threat is
felt in all the big talking in Pirandello—that of his Henry
IV, that of his Ponza and Frola, and that of the Father. The
topic here, is schizophrenia and Pirandello's plays have
become easier to comprehend in the light of studies of
schizoid problems written in the past several decades.
It is interesting that in two generations a great
dramatist has led the psychologists in providing a classic
image of modern man. Ibsen, just before Freud, presented
Modern Man as Neurotic. Pirandello, anticipating the study
of schizophrenia by a whole school psychiatrists from
Minkowski to Laing, showed how integral to modern life is
“the schizophrenic experience.” His Henry IV is the
schizophrenic as tragic hero.
the devils and hobgoblins at arm's length. In short, he is
what our grandparents called a lunatic. He is "mad as a
hatter." Critics and actors who have resisted this conclusion
have never got very far with Six Character in Search of an
Author.
Yet the Father's manic behavior on stage is the least of
it. In drama, as in life, character is found in concentrated
form in men's decisions and actions which entail decisions.
What have been this man's decisions? Since he is nothing if
not a father and a husband, we must ask what he has done
for his son and wife. When the former was a baby he sent
him into the country to be nursed. It would be healthier.
This is a rich man who prefers the ways of the poor. But
when does he have his son brought back? We are not told,
except that it was too late. The boy returned as an alien and
an enemy. And the wife? He pushed her into the arms of his
secretary. These, too, were good, simple people—also
poor—who understood each other. The Father's actions
have been such as to destroy his own family by driving them
away. Obviously, he is what is usually called schizophrenic,
and must isolate himself, even though isolation, in turn,
becomes torture. If he can't stand company, equally he
cannot stand himself. Desperate measures are taken against
the outer world on behalf of the inner world, but to no avail.
The inner world feels as insecure as ever, and the Father
goes out in search of...well, in the first instance, company.
He becomes a client of Madama Pace's, the Pacifying
Madam. What, in external terms, goes wrong at her place
we know. What does it all signify? Again, it suffices to look
closely at the specific data. His wife he considered motherly
but asexual. Madama Pace is a mother who sells sex. She is
motherhood degraded, and she is sex degraded. As Dr.
Kligerman has noticed, she is the "giantess of the nursery,"
the castrating nanny and, according to the first version,
carries scissors. Perhaps it was defensiveness that made
Pirandello omit the scissors from the revised text; surely
they are a vivid touch. And the Step-daughter, whatever else
she is, is the Mother when young, the Mother with sex
appeal, as in Enrico IV where the Emperor embraces the
daughter instead of the mother. What is the substance of the
encounter at Madama Pace's? The evil mother offers our
man a girl. The girl says: My father just died. The man says:
Take your dress off. The good mother rushes in, crying:
Stop, that's my daughter! A hideous little instrument of selftorture, this phantasy, though no more so than a thousand
others in the chronicles of schizophrenia.
In nothing is the complexity of Pirandello's
dramaturgy more evident than in this creation, Madame
Pace. She is not one of the six characters. She is conjured
up by the spirit of the theatre on the initiative of the Father.
What does he mean by this initiative, and what does his
author mean? Six Characters in Search of an Author can be
conceived of as many concentric circles, in which case
Madame Pace might well be the innermost circle: play
within play within play within play...Now the most helpful
insight into plays within plays - or rather dreams within
dreams—has been Freud's. He remarked that we dream we
are dreaming when we especially wish to disown a
...the experience and behavior that gets labelled
schizophrenic is a special strategy that a person
invents in order to live in an unlivable situation.6
In Right You Are, the Ponza/Frola narrative is an
elaboration of such a special strategy, neither more nor less.
Such strategies constitute the sanity of the insane, the
rationality of the irrational. That is one paradox which
Pirandello has in common with recent psychologists.
Another is that the sane may not be any more rational. So
one can regard the insane as sane, and the sane as insane.
The thought is no longer new, but new testimony to its truth
is printed in each day's newspaper.
What is the Father doing? He is talking to live—that
is, to avoid getting killed. He is fighting off the arrows of
the Indian hordes of the soul. The world’s implosion, Dr.
Laing calls that kind of threat. The father is also trying to
keep from drowning, from inundation. Dr. Laing speaks of
engulfment. Like a witch doctor, the Father hopes to hold
21
particular phantasy as "only a dream." And the phantasies
we particularly wish to disown present what troubles us
most in a rather blunt form. Madama Pace is not one of the
actors, she is not one of the six, she is conjured up by one of
the six, or by his "idea of a theatre." Most likely (as
psychoanalysts will suggest) she is what troubles Pirandello.
Certainly she is what troubles the Father: his mother as
"giantess of the nursery" as castrator. Above all, as
procuress-provider and degrader of sexual pleasure. The
Father is this play's Dr. Faustus, and she is his bad angel.
If she is a go-between, between whom does she go?
Between the two families that the six characters consist of.
And the story of the six can usefully be seen as a
confrontation of these two groups, the legitimate and the
illegitimate, pursuing licit and illicit love. Each of the three
traumatic situations I have described brings the two groups
into desperate conflict: father with his wife's illegitimate
daughter, adulterous mother with the legitimate son,
illegitimate younger children with the legitimate son. It is
appropriate to this play that one finds oneself proposing
different ways of looking at it. Each way is likely to have its
peculiar advantage. And the schema just provided has the
advantage of bringing out the special importance of the Son.
He "dominates" two of the bad situations, and is not outside
the third one (since he reacts strongly to the "incest"). When
we speak of sibling murder, we can cite the Son as the
murderer of both younger children.
If the confrontation of the legitimate and the
illegitimate families is important to the structure of the play,
what of the confrontation we began to look into a few
minutes ago, that of the family with the theatrical troupe?
Of all the concentric circles, this is perhaps the outermost
one. Which in itself might tend to make a psychiatrist regard
it as the least important, since the doctor's job is to look for
hidden disease and penetrate disguises. Art, however, is not
a disease, and in theatre art the disguise is in a clear sense
the ding an sich. Nor - contrary to what any academic as
well as clinical critics assume - does the artist harbor a
general prejudice in favor of hidden meanings and against
obvious ones. On the contrary, the weight to be given to the
most external of the dramas in Six Characters must be
decided without prejudice against externality. It is wholly a
question of what weight, by his own artistic means, did
Pirandello give to it.
Well, to begin with, he derived the title of the whole
work from it, and considering how unerring his intuition
was apt to be in such matters, this "small" item should not
be overlooked. Granted that the substance of Action in the
work is inner, neurotic, and even schizophrenic experience,
what of the ever-present fact that the vehicle of Action is
this conceit: characters in search of an author? It is a search
with two aspects: the wish for a play to be written and the
wish for it to be enacted. Let us take the second aspect first.
Enactment. If there is anything we are not in doubt
about after we have seen this play it is that, for its author, all
the world is a stage. Totus mundus facit histrionem, as the
motto of the Globe Theatre read. But a specific application
here that is not so obvious. What happens when the actors
try to enact the scene in Madama Pace's shop? They fail.
But the point of the passage is lost when the actors are
presented as inept. That kind of failure has too little content.
A bad actor is a bad actor, period. What relationship does
Pirandello define between the real thing and the reenactment? Is it not that of a translation that cannot in the
nature of things be a faithful one? The best analogy I can
find is with the attempt to reconstruct a dream with the aid
of notes jotted down upon waking. The notes are very
definite, perhaps; but they are fragmentary. There are gaps,
and above all the tone of feeling that characterized the
whole world of the dream has gone. The Pirandellian reenactment is incomplete and deeply unsatisfying in just this
way.
But enactment is only an offshoot anyway, an offshoot
of what is to be enacted: the author's work.
And who is searching for him? Six characters? Not
really. There is no evidence that the two children think
themselves engaged in such a search. Like children
generally, they are dragged along. The older boy definitely
objects to the search, practices civil disobedience against it:
that is what breaks up the experiment, and precipitates the
end of the play. The mother is distressed by the experiment,
and gets dragged in against her will. That leaves just two
characters who do search for an author - the Father and the
Stepdaughter. And only these two had previously pleaded
with the author who created them to make them part of a
complete work of art:
...trying to persuade him, trying to push him...I
would appear be-fore him sometimes, sometimes
she would go to him, sometimes that poor
mother.... (The Father)
...I too went there, sir, to tempt him, many times,
in the melancholy of that study of his, at the
twilight hour when he would sit stretched out in
his armchair, unable to make up his mind to
switch the light on, and letting the evening
shadows invade the room, knowing that these
shadows were alive with us... (The Stepdaughter)
Even the Stepdaughter has only a conditional interest
in finding an author, the condition being that the Father
insists on finding him. Then she will meet the challenge.
The Father is the challenger: it is his project. And the play
Six Characters in Search of an Author is his play—not in
the sense that other characters are aspects of him but in the
sense that he is consistently the prime mover. The story of
the six starts from his actions—in marrying, in becoming a
father, but even more in driving wife and son out. It starts
again from his actions on the death of his rival: meeting the
daughter at Madame Pace's, taking the family back into his
house. The various family catastrophes stem from him. He
is the base of that Oedipal triangle on which the family story
rests. Last—and, to a dramatic critic, not least—he takes the
initiative in the new and present Action. Our play begins
with the arrival of the Father at the theatre, and from then on
22
what we are witnessing is the encounter of the Father with
the Capocomico. The latter is a Director, not an Author—
yet another of the play's special twists-but the question
before us is whether he will take on a writer's chores and
write, as well as direct, the play into which the six
characters would properly fit. As soon as he has decided not
to, "our play is done," and Father's Day is over.
It is odd that anyone should speak of character
conflicts in Six Characters without mentioning the one that
stands in the foreground and works its way out of the
primary Action. I suppose it could only happen because of
that prejudice in favor of the secret and murky that I was
speaking of. In itself the confrontation Father/Director is an
archetypal affair: the confrontation of pathetic suffering
humanity with the authorities: And these authorities are
portrayed, in almost Shavian fashion, not as hostile and
malicious but as open-natured, well-meaning, and far more
reasonable than suffering humanity. It is true they are also
smug, a little stupid, and very much out of contact - theirs is
the lifestyle of bureaucrats and organization men.
Which would just be a picture of normal experience
except that Pirandello pushes it, in his usual manner, far
beyond the normalities; and Father and Director come to
embody two sides of a schizophrenic situation. Through the
Father we glimpse the inner world of modern man, through
the Director, the outer. Both these worlds are shown as
spiritually impoverished. The inner world of the Father
contains nothing much besides his two or three phantasies
and the pain he feels in failing to justify himself. The
Director's outer world is reduced to rituals that preserve the
appearances and maintain the occasion, habits, routines,
cliches. All that either the Father or the Director do is
repeat themselves, a factor which is close to the central
metaphor of the play: life as theatre. Which aspect of theatre
is exhibited in the play? Not performance. Only rehearsal—
repetition. The stage is bare. The auditorium is empty. The
theatre, too, is impoverished and deprived. The bourgeois
drama, which had become thrilling through a kind of
claustrophobic tension, here dissolves in agoraphobia, its
opposite.
What is the Father seeking in the Director? An author
who will put him in a play and justify him. In what sense
"justify"? First of all, defend him from the Stepdaughter's
charge of bestiality by citing the sexual needs of middleaged men living apart from their wives, and so on. Is that
all? Nothing in Six Characters is ever all. If the plot has an
outermost circle, the theme hasn't. It reaches out toward
infinity, a place where there is either emptiness or God. It
should not be too surprising that a great play of dead or
agonized fatherhood reverberates with the sense of God the
Father, or rather of his absence—the "death of God." A
search for an author can easily suggest a search for the
Author of our being, and the main metaphor of the play has
reminded some people of Calderòn's El gran teatro del
mundo. I only wonder they haven't commented on the
opening words of that work: "Sale el Autor..." Enter the
Author in a starry mantle with nine rays of light in groups of
threes on his hat." This is, of course, God.
It is not necessary to assume that Pirandello had
Calderòn in mind, or that he thought directly of God at all.
God is meaning, God is authority and authorship, God is
fatherhood. A poignant sense of the absence of all these
burns through every page of Six Characters in Search of an
Author.
To me, the deepest—or perhaps—I mean soundest
interpretation of the search for an author would stress
neither God nor literary author ship but fatherhood, and I
like to think I derive this choice not from personal
predilection, but from the text. The concisest way of stating
what the Father demands of the Director in human terms—
and Pirandello is always in search of the centrally human—
is to say he is asking him to be his father. "Father me.” In
other words,"Rescue me from this maniacal female. Tell me
what is so, reassure me, help me find my place in the story,
in the scheme of things, take from me this burden which I
cannot bear but which you can." And the Director is very
much the daddy of his troupe: that is established at his first
entrance. But being the daddy of these lightweight
Thespians is one thing, taking on suffering, schizoid
humanity is another, particularly in the case of one who
calls himself "Father" and should be able to fend for
himself. In any event, the Director is another very
inadequate Father. Something of a grotesque, he stands in
the same relationship to fatherhood as Madama Pace does
to motherhood. (Father, Director, Secretary-Lover: three
fathers. Mother, Pace, Step-daughter: three mothers.
Another of this play's many symmetries.) But while she
castrates, he is castrated: he has the character of the
traditional impotent old clown. Our intellectual author
transposes this impotence to the literary plane where the
Director can prove impotent to make art from the Father's
life, life from the Father's art.
In one respect the word "author" is exactly right in
suggesting just what a "father" might be expected to
provide. When the Father finds the right playwright he will
not be content to be given some dialogue in which he can
rapidly discomfit his stepdaughter. His ambition goes far
beyond that. He is not even saying, "Write a melodrama,
and make me the hero." He is saying, "A person is an entity
with no clear meaning-an entity close to non-entity—unless
there is an author to make him part of (a part in) a play."
A severed hand, Aristotle has it, is not a hand at all
because it could function as a hand only by belonging to
arm and body. A character severed from a play is not even a
character. A person severed from his family is not even a
person. But what is he? And what can he do about it? We
need to watch the words and actions of the Father to find the
answer to such questions. Is the Father’s quest as hopeless
as the effort to graft a hand back onto an arm? Or is success
in the quest within the power of an Author—in one sense or
another of the word "author"? This is not a play that
provides answers. At any rate, it is not a play that provides
positive answers. But neither is it a play in which the
objects of yearning have been eliminated. Nostalgia
pervades it. Nostalgia for what? For some kind of
"togetherness.” Is this just a regressive fantasy, the longing
23
for the union of embryo and mother? Child and mother?
There is something here of the modern isolated individual's
longing for a social community, but again it is a longing
directed backward toward some golden age, nor forward
toward a new society. By consequence, it is a fantasy not of
freedom but of freely accepted bondage.
If only the Father could be part of a play so he
explains in the terms of Pirandello's literary conceit, he
would have the permanence of Sancho Panza or Don
Abbondio. Interpreting the play, we might translate this
back into terms of life, thus: to have a part in a play means
to be a member of a family, and the family is seen as an
organism in which each cell lives in and by a happy
interdependence. Before such a family could exist, the kind
of life we find in Pirandello's play would need to be
enormously enriched. It requires a texture far finer than
phantasy and fear and guilt can provide. God is love;
Father, too, would have to be love. That is the kind of
Father this Father is in search of in a play which might just
as well be called A Father in Search of a Father.
The crowning, and Pirandellian, irony comes when the
Director's contribution to the proposed "drama," instead of
enriching it, actually impoverishes it further. I am speaking
of his work on the scene in Act Two. What he starts from is
a piece of raw life, or rather a piece of raw erotic phantasy.
Give this bit of life or phantasy to a Shakespeare, in the age
of Shakespeare, and it becomes Antony and Cleopatra with
noble enough roles in it for many. All our Director can do is
convert it into what in America we would call Broadway
drama, in which the already attenuated naturalism of the
scene has to be further attenuated in the interests of middleclass entertainment.
Shakespeare proves in Hamlet that the schizophrenia
of an Ophelia can be part of a grand design. Pirandello is
interested in showing that in life she would encounter
someone like the Director in Six Characters or the Doctor
in Enrico IV. That is to say, she would be on her own.
Which is what schizophrenia is. Art is sane. Life is
schizoid, and offers only schizoid solutions, as in Right You
Are. In Enrico IV, the schizoid solution is a starting point,
then the “sane” people break into pieces, as it is always the
itch of the "sane” people to do. One must reckon with this
itch in the Director and Actors in Six Characters. Yet the
play exhibits neither a solution nor a cataclysm—only a
constantly re-enacted phantasy, a father journeying
endlessly onward like the Flying Dutchman.
Now what the Dutchman was searching for was love.
Is the Father's aim all that different?
This is the point at which that "great deal of
discussion" which Dr. Kligerman complains of can perhaps
be comprehended, for the bulk of it consists of long
speeches made by the Father. If, as most critics have
assumed, they are really there as exposition of a philosophy
then surely they will be an unwelcome intrusion What is
their content? I d say that two main points are made one
directed at the Stepdaughter (particularly toward the end of
Act One) one directed at the Director (particularly, at the
beginning of Act Three). The first point is that personality is
not unitary but multiple. The second point is that illusion is
reality. In the context it is not essential that these topics be
regarded as interesting in themselves. They are dramatized.
Which is to say they become Action. Just as talking is
something the Father has to do to live, so resorting to the
particular “talking points” he makes is a matter of urgent
necessity for him. If the theory of multiple personality did
not exist he would have to invent it. It gets him off the hook
on which the incident at Madame Pace’s had hung him.
He is not necessarily right, however, even though his
view coincides with the author's philosophy. From the point
of view of drama, I would hold that he is wrong. For the art
of drama, as Aristotle explained, takes for granted that
actions do define a character. A man is what he does at
Madame Pace's, and all his talk about really being otherwise
is so much...well, talk. Whatever Pirandello may have
believed, his dramas are drama, and present people as their
actions. True, talking is an action—the Father's principal
action most of the time—but it is precisely his compulsive
talking that inclines us not to accept the endless self-pity
and self-justification at face value. The Father feels that he
is many and not one. But that, as we blithely say is "his
problem." He is a very irresponsible man, if sane; and, if not
responsible for his actions, then insane. On either
assumption, he needs just the philosophy Pirandello gives
him. Nothing diffuses responsibility more conveniently than
the theory that one is a succession of different people. And
if one is insane, one is surely entitled to complain a good
deal of that radical disjunction which is one's fate. One may
even project it on everyone else.
Freud compares paranoid fantasies to metaphysical
systems. It is a comparison that makes some sense in
reverse. The Pirandellian metaphysics provides apt fantasies
for his mentally disturbed characters.
I gave as the Father's second philosophic idea that
illusion is reality. Which is also "what everybody knows
about Luigi Pirandello." To say that illusion is reality is, on
the face of it, nonsense but can be construed as sense by
taking it paradoxically. It is as a paradox that the notion has
its primary use to Pirandello. For paradoxes, when
expanded, become comedies. The expansion happens, in
Pirandello, by doubling and redoubling. Take, in our play,
the opposites life and art. The actors are from life. The
characters are from art. However, nothing begins to "pop"
as comedy, as drama, until the author reverses the
proposition. The characters are more real, are therefore
portrayed more as what we regard as people from life: they
have instincts, impulses, private lives. The actors are less
real, and are therefore portrayed as artifacts, as "types," as
creatures Out of a play. In short, the actors are from art. The
characters from life. What one might call the intellectual
comedy of Six Characters in Search of an Author is built
upon this reversibility of the key terms. And what is the
truth? Which is "really" life, and which is "really" art?
There Pirandello-Laudisi lies in wait for us-laughing.
Everything in his little system (or game, if we must be upto-date) works both ways. Nothing is "really" so, because
everything is "really" so.
24
Now a person making use of this system—a person
playing this game - can have everything both ways. Which
is a very nice way to have everything: it is what we all want,
though in proportion as we cease to be childish or sick we
learn to do without a good deal of what we all want. The
Father, however, is childish and sick. The Pirandellian game
is after his own heart. In Act Two, he is essentially telling
the actors to subordinate their art to life. All that is wrong
with their performance is that it isn't naturalistic, it isn't
exactly what happened in Madame Pace's shop. But in his
theoretical vein, he usually exalts art above life. Similarly,
he can use the word "illusion" in a pejorative sense, as when
he tells the Director that the actors' lives are more an
illusion than the characters' lives, while in the same breath
speaking of illusion with respect and a kind of nostalgic
awe. All of this is word play, word game, inconclusive, and
in principle endless— and therefore very depressing.
Pirandello can call Laudisism "deviltry" and ask for a
comedic tone, but it is black comedy at best: its underside is
despair. Pursue any statement the Father may offer as
consolation and you will find it lets you down with a bump.
For example: art as a solution to the bafflements of
impermanence. As a statue you can live forever. The only
thing is: you're dead. Petrifaction is no answer, but only
corresponds to yet another schizoid wish. And anyene who
knows this particular Father will quickly sense that his wish
to be w work of art is his wish to escape from flesh and
blood—that is from life. As with other schizophrenics, the
great fear of being killed does not prevent him from
yearning for death. Indeed it is at this stage of the argument
that we realize that the Father's two main points have, for
him, the same point: he wants to get out of his own skin. He
is “one.” But he cites as his alibi that nobody real. He is
trying to non-exist. His personality can, as it were, be
diffused horizontally, losing itself in moments or states of
mind, alleged other personalities. Or it can be diffused
vertically in vapors of idea. But total nonexistence is too
terrifying to flatly accept. One has to try and coax it into
acceptability. By paradox. By dialectic. All of which is
evasion, though, for a schizophrenic, a necessary evasion.
"If the self is not true to itself, it is in despair," says
Kierkegaard. Pirandello depicts a despair so deep that his
schizophrenics cannot afford to admit they have selves to be
untrue to. The theory of multiple personality is a byproduct
of the despair, and, for the Father, a necessary fiction.
The very notion that illusion is reality stems from
defeatism. Philosophically, it represents the breakdown of
the Hegelian tradition in which there was always a reality to
offset appearances. Once the reality starts to be eroded,
there will eventually be nothing left but the appearances;
and at this point in time philosophers start to advocate
accepting facts at face value-face—value is the only value
they have or the world has. Hence, for example, a
contemporary of Pirandello's who later became the house
philosopher of Mussolini, Giovanni Gentile, wrote in 1916:
"The truth is what is in the making. "7
In this respect, there are only two interpretations of Six
Characters in Search of an Author. According to one, the
play itself endorses Gentile, endorses the Father's
philosophic utterances. According to the other, which I
subscribe to, the play is larger than the Father, "places" him
in a larger setting, makes his pathos unsympathetic. I am not
going to argue that the play embodies a positive faith. A
critic who did this had to rely upon a single sentence that is
present only in the first edition.8 I am arguing that it is not a
philosophical play at all because the philosophy is
harnessed to a nonphilosophical chariot. The content is
psychopathological from beginning to end.
Perhaps I've said overmuch about psychological
motifs. This is an exuberant, excessive, Sicilian work, and
from perhaps overmuch suggestiveness may easily come
overmuch critical suggestion. Let my last comments be
about the form of the work. The first thing a traditional
critic—if such a person still exists - would notice about this
search for an author is that it respects the unities of time,
place, and action. In other words, it conspicuously possesses
that compact and classic dramatic structure which the "play
in the making" (with its story of the six) conspicuously
lacks. The space of time covered is literally the time spent
in the theatre plus enough extra hours or minutes to permit
the Director to call the session a "whole day"—if we must
take him literally. Place is given in an equally literal way.
And there is something Pirandellian in the fact that such
literalness could be a brainstorm. What earned the Maestro
the highest compliments for originality was that in his work
the boards of the theatre represent-the boards of the theatre.
That is to say, they do not represent, they are. They are
appearances which are the reality: the quintessential
Pirandellian principle.
The final point of this handling of place is a dialectical
one. The boards of the theatre are to be so definite, so "real"
because the "real" streets of the town and country, the
gardens, the houses and rooms are to be so shadowy, so
"unreal." The interaction of these two elements gives
Pirandello a goodly part of his play-and a good deal that is
peculiar to his play.
Time also is handled dialectically. Over against this
flatly undistorted present on the stage is the story of the six,
all of which is already past. The six are trying to pull all this
baggage of theirs, as the patient does on the doctor's couch,
from the dim, anesthetic past into the garish, stinging
present. The past of the six and the present of the acting
troupe are so clearly demarcated that some people see only
the one, some only the other, whereas, to realize what
Pirandello is up to, we not only have to see both but the
constant reaction of one upon the other. There is a further
complication. The past and present of the six are not clearly
demarcated, but, on the contrary, are deliberately mingled,
as in dreams. Hence, for example, though the Stepdaughter
has already left her parents, here she is back with them, and
the younger children, who have died, are alive again. They
will die again, and the play will end with the Stepdaughter
leaving her parents. . . But I am afraid that in turning from
content to form, I have been turned back, by the work itself,
from form to content.
25
One last notation. By an error which was to create a
possibly permanent misunderstanding, Six Characters in
Search of an Author in its first edition was subtitled: "a play
in the making."9 But the play in the making is the projected
play about the six characters that never gets made. The play
that gets made is the play about the encounter of the six
characters (seven, finally) with the Director and his acting
troupe. This of course includes as much of the unwritten
play as is needed. Finally, then, Six Characters becomes a
play fully made. Bernard Shaw said he had never come
across so original a play.10 It is a supreme contribution that
says something profound about the theatre and about life
seen as theatre and seen by means of the theatre. The
originality should not blind us to the beauty of the form or
to that existential anguish which is the content.
accompanying note. Also The Interpretation of Dreams,
trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955),
p.491.
4. Kligerman, "A Psychoanalytic Study of Pirandello's Six
Characters in Search of an Author," Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association 12 (October
1962).
5. I should perhaps say "Section One," as the Italian
editions have no act divisions. But many Americans
know the play from a translation that names the sections
Acts.
5. Pirandello's countryman Suetonius wrote about Titus:
"Recalling that he had not granted a single favor all day,
he [said]: 'I have lost a day.'”
6. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York:
Pantheon), 1967.
7. The Theory of Mind as Pure Act (New York: Macmillan,
1922)
8. La giara e altre novelle, a cura di Giuseppe Lanza
(Milan, 1965), p. 15.
9. The Italian original reads: "una commedia ila fare." In
the translation most widely read in America, this has
been rendered: "a comedy in the making." But in Italian,
as in French, a "commedia" (comedie) is not necessarily
comic, and the word should often be translated as a
"play." (That the story of the six should turn out comic
is out of the question.) Second, if the phrase "in the
making" suggests, as I think it does, that there are the
makings of a play in this material (which is the opposite
of what Pirandello is saying), then it is a mistranslation
of "da fare”, which means, literally "to make," and, less
literally, "to be made," "yet to be made," "not yet
made." Incidentally "in the making" cited above
Giovanni Gentile does not translate "da fare." Gentile's
original reads: "Vero e quel che si fa," which would be
rendered literally: "True is that which is done."
10. When Pirandello's preface to Six Characters was
published in French translation (Revue de Paris, July 15,
1925), Pirandello added this paragraph (here literally
translated) to the text: If modesty forbids me to accept 0.
B. Shaw's assertion that Six Characters is the most
original and most powerful work of all the theatres
ancient and modern in all nations, I can't help being
aware that their appearance in the history of the Italian
theatre marks a date that people won't be able to forget.
When at a later date this passage was brought to Shaw's
attention, he commented: "I have no recollection of the
extravagant dictum you quote: but I rank P. as first rate
among playwrights and have never come across a play
so original as Six Characters [sic]" (The Shavian,
February 1964).
Eric Bentley. (1946). “Six Characters in Search of an
Author.” The Pirandello Commentaries. Evanston, Illinois:
Northwestern University Press.
Notes
1. The plot or non-plot is incorrectly summed up incorrectly
in handbooks (Burns Mantle, F. K. W. Drury) but by
reputable critics such as Joseph Wood Krutch. Indeed ,
my own summary originally contained a bad inaccuracy
which Robert Brustein pointed out to me.
2. The evidence for this is in two short stories, "Tragedy of
a Character" (1911) and "Conversations with
Characters" (1915), in a letter to his son Stefano dated
1917, and in a passage (undated) from a projected
novel-in-the-making cited in the sixth volume of the
collected works (1960). This last-named passage is
about Madama Pace's establishment, and suggests the
possibility that it was with this image that Six
Characters began - a tempting point in the light of the
interpretation of the play offered above. The letter to
Stefano is also cited to this extent in the sixth volume of
the collected works: But I already have my head full of
novelties So many short stories. And a queer thing, so
sad, so very sad: Six Characters in Search of an Author:
novel-in-the-making. Maybe you understand. Six
characters, caught in a terrible drama, who visit me to
get themselves put into a novel. An obsession. And I
don't want to know about it. I tell them it's no use. What
do I care about them? What do I care about anything?
And they show me all their sores. And I send them
packing. -and in this way finally the novel-in-themaking turns out to be made. Incidentally, in the
projected novel-in-the-making, Madame Pace's shop did
have a precise location: Rome.
3. See letter to Fliess dated May 2,1897, and the
26
the auditorium, in a box and in the corridors and
in the lobby of a theatre, but also because the
whole complex of theatrical elements - characters
and actors, author and director, dramatic critics
and spectators (external to the action or involved
in it)—present every possible conflict.
A Translator's Introduction, 1998
By Eric Bentley
It is not often that anything really happens in the
history of drama, but at least twice in this our century, now
about over, something did. Many of us can remember the
second of these occasions: It was the premiere of Waiting
for Godot, Paris; 1953. The first occasion, before our time
maybe, was the premiere of Six Characters in Search of an
Author, Rome, 1921. Acclaim, on this earlier occasion, was
not immediate. The first-night audience just shouted:
"Manicomio!— Madhouse!" But by 1925 the playwright
who had created the Six Characters was ready to announce:
In these final years of the twentieth century theatregoers and
readers find these features no longer innovative but familiar,
yet in the early twenties, audiences were amazed and
perhaps dismayed to find, on entering the auditorium, the
curtain up and stage work-lights illuminating the (possibly
brick back wall of the theatre. This feature, together with
the others listed here in Pirandello's own words, abolished
the proscenium arch and therewith a whole host of
traditional theatrics coming down through the Victorian
theatre from the earlier Baroque. This was, according to a
leading American playwright of the thirties and forties,
Thornton Wilder, the new theatre, the theatre of "our time."
There were scholarly commentators, of a historical
bent to remark that there is nothing new under the sun, and
that Pirandello had merely taken over the play-within-aplay, long ago adopted by Shakespeare in The Taming of
the Shrew and, in another way, in Hamlet; but that is only a
pedantic gibe. Nearer to Pirandello are two plays (c. 1800)
of the German poet Ludwig Tieck, Puss in Boots and The
Land of Upside Down, in which different orders of being
(characters, spectators, writers, et al.) inter-mingle much
more intricately than in the old-fashioned play-within-a-play
(of which a fairer example than any-thing in Shakespeare is
Beaumont and Fletcher's Knight of the Burning Pestle).
Not even Tieck comes close. If his heterodox form
represents more than a technical experiment, it still is only
playful. Perhaps it derived from a theory or can be
attributed to one in hindsight, but Pirandello's "experiment"
is quite other than technical and external, and if he had
some pertinent theories, they were thought up later or
provided by his admiring critic Adriano Tilgher. My
allusion here is to the Preface to the play which Pirandello
published in 1925, and even there he states that the play was
in no way a premeditated thing: It was a dream play that
came to him spontaneously and rapidly as dreams come: in
a series of images, all highly charged , not with philosophy,
but with emotion, with passion.
Above all, Six Characters was not experimental. No
first-rate art is. Experiments belong to science: The scientist
decides on a hypothesis and then tests it, knowing that many
tests will fail, but that he might make a break-through
someday That is not how artists work, and the
"experimental forms" of, say, Conrad or Faulkner are really
quite un-experimental: They evolved organically from their
authors' original sense of narrative. And so, while Six
Characters was something that came to his mind quickly, as
in a vision, Pirandello had been working toward it for years,
as can readily be shown by examination of not only his
previous plays, but also his novels and short stories.
If Six Characters should not be taken as a technical
experiment, what should it be taken as? Or, to focus the
If modesty forbids me to accept George Bernard
Shaw's assertion that Six Characters is the most
original and most powerful work of all the
theatres ancient and modern in all nations, I can't
help being aware that their appearance in the
history of the Italian theatre marks a date that
people won't be able to forget.
Well, yes, he was carried away. Shaw had not asserted that.
Asked for a comment, Shaw actually said:
I have no recollection of the extravagant dictum
you quote: but I rank Pirandello as first rate
among playwrights and have never come across a
play so original as Six Characters [sic].
And we know Shaw had "come across" a lot of plays:
from Shakespeare to Ibsen-and Shaw. So original. Not the
greatest of plays, perhaps, but the most original. More
original than the Oresteia or Timburlaine or Faust or A
Doll's House, to name just four plays that have been
considered innovative? Comparative measurement is
impossible. Shaw's claim is based, surely, not on precise
parallels, but on a sense of the radicality of Pirandello's
action in pe rming this particular script. Was he writing a
play at all? And if not, what was this product he called Six
Characters in Search of an Author? A disqulsitory dialogue
about the writing of plays? A play-in-the-making, to use a
Pirandellian phrase, but therefore not made and so:
unfinished? A quasi-improvisation of a play? A fantasy
founded on the notion that characters are not created by an
author, but are preternatural people who seek an author to
write their biographies or at least their family drama?
One might go first to Pirandello himself for answers.
He provided some. Speaking of this play and two others
(Each in His Own Way and Tonight We Improvise), he
wrote:
... the three together... form something of a
trilogy of the theatre in the theatre, not only
because there is action both on the stage and in
27
question better, if all the features of "theatre in the theatre"
are not technical experiments, what are they? Here the
answer, in my view, is not the same for Six Characters as
for the other two plays I have mentioned (or other
Pirandello plays I have not mentioned). These other plays
can fairly be seen as, to a large extent, pieces a' these: They
are structured to prove a point, albeit to prove it quite
dramatically and therefore passionately. The final moments
of these plays come with the force of Euclid's Quod erat
demonstrandum. Even so tense and hectic a drama as
Emperor Henry (Enrico IV) is not an exception.
Six Characters is. And I have always relished the final
line of its first version: "So I've wasted a whole day!" says
the Director, which might be translated as: So it doesn't
amount to a hill of beans. Conclusions anyone? No grand
conclusion, certainly. Perhaps no conclusion at all.
Six Characters offers fragments, vignettes, visionary
scenes, arranged in a certain order, not by the brains of a
craftsman-calculator as in the French well-made play or
commercial drama generally, but by intuition, imagination,
fancy (call it what you will). The effect is dazzling, and
critics have been dazzled. Now when dazzled, you see
nothing but, remembering bits and pieces, you can begin to
speculate. There is a body of ideas by now universally
denominated "Pirandellian," and here is the Maestro
attempting to compress them into half a dozen lines:
into trouble with Pirandello because, for him, life is itself a
play. Doesn't the actor imitate (i.e., enact) the non-actor, the
"real" person? Yes, but for Pirandello, the real person is an
actor. “All the world's a stage/ And all the men and women
merely players." When the work known as Six Characters
in Search of an Author is performed, the stage becomes
more real than the world. Isn't this obvious, and entirely
convincing, to the audience? The boards of the theatre are
the prior reality the bits of scenery called for by the
Director, quite secondary. Returning to the topic of
originality I should interject here that this was the first play
ever written in which the boards of the theatre did not
symbolize and rep resent some other place, some other
reality. Think of the prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V:
Directly or indirectly it defines the norm, for that cockpit
did "hold the vasty fields of France," "the very casques that
did affright the air at Agincourt" were crammed within that
"wooden O." How abnormal is Signor Pirandello!
What has seemed to some to be mere flash—just
fireworks and legerdemain—has its origin in a particular
personal and social experience of the author and retains the
pain—extreme pain, which is to say, agony, torment—of
that experience, however far he proceeds into
exemplification and elaboration. Here let me insert, as
something more than an obiter dictum, that the art of the
drama must always confront human suffering, the greatest
dramatists being those who respond most fully to this
challenge.
I have been able to note how Six Characters in Search
of an Author was produced in Italy, France, Britain, and the
U.S. during the past half century. Most of the productions
I've seen (and this includes some that I've seen lately on
American TV) have been characterized by directorial
brilliance—a factor not irrelevant to Pirandello's way of
seeing things. Yet that heady brilliance (Tyrone Guthrie's,
for instance) turned the show too far toward comedy. It
became a "simply delightful affair”—with lots of clever
choreography as well as well-handled repartee. Human
suffering was absent, or so mildly present as to present us,
the audience, with no pang, not even a twinge.
Twinges and pangs are called for, however, and this
author does all an authorcan do to help the actors
communicate them. The particular personal and social
experience just mentioned is this. In the Sicilian village
culture from which he came, Pirandello was struck - more
than struck: overwhelmed—by the misery of family life.
(He believed in "family values" but did not feel that many
agreed with him or at any rate that real families often
achieved anything but misery.) He could depict that misery
in the straightforward way of the Naturalists à la Zola, as his
early fiction shows, but his growing preoccupation was with
the way misery was observed by the neighbors and with the
way being observed not only increased the misery but
became itself the pervasive and, as it were, definitive
misery.
Pirandello's Six Characters are actors, enactors, of a
universal family catastrophe. They would like Pirandello
just to present this in a novel or a play. He declines, and
the deceit of mutual understanding irremediably
founded on the empty abstraction of words, the
multiple personality of everyone (corresponding
to the possibilities of being to be found In each
of us), and finally the inherent tragic conflict
between life (which is always moving and
changing) and form (which fixes it, immutable).
And, oh yes, all these messages are delivered, some of them
more than once or twice, in Six Characters.
Result: A critic has spotted this message or that and
declared it The Meaning of Six Characters in Search of an
Author. Perhaps this idea or that was stated with particular
poignancy, and perhaps it had particular Significance for
this critic or that: He or she had that much justification for
seizing on it and brandishing it with enthusiasm: Pirandello
the Light Bearer! which would be fair enough were this an
essay offering miscellaneous ideas from which you take
your pick. But supposing it is a play, all appearances to the
contrary notwithstanding? Some of the more philosophic
commentators have informed us that it isn't a play. Not as
we think of plays. We think of plays as Aristotle described
them, and as all the dramatists down the centuries since
have written them. But Pirandello blew the whistle? No
longer would a play be an imitation (mimesis) of an action
and of life? It would be not only the medium but the
message: The play would imitate plays or bog down in its
effort to do so?
One could pursue this line of thought (and a dozen
related lines of thought) further. Instead I propose the
following. Yes, the idea of a play mirroring life does run
28
instead watches them - is their first audience. Their second
audience is the Director and his troupe of actors. Their third
audience is the reader of this Pirandello script—or the
spectator in Pirandello's theatre. We have concentric circles
here, and this final one, the theatre audience, makes a
decisive difference. It changes the nature of the smaller
circles. For a mere reader, the characters can be accepted as
just characters, the actors as just actors, but, for spectators,
the characters are actors playing characters, and the acting
troupe is actors playing actors. Which, of course, is a big
"Pirandernan" point
Even the reader catches the main drift: That the deeper
suffering is not the suffering within the family, but the
suffering created by the interaction of family and nonfamily, family and director, family and actors. As for the
communication of suffering to the theatre audience: This of
course, is a different kind of suffering. The issue has been
discussed by philosophers of drama for hundreds of years:
How can tragic suffering on stage not give such pain to the
audience that they faint or leave the theatre The answer is
that the audience does not suffer as the characters do, but
equally relevant here is that, if none of the suffering comes
home, and vividly, to the audience then they are left
indifferent or bored. The director may decide to amuse them
if he cannot move them, yet in the case of Six Characters,
that would be to trivialize Pirandello's work and miss the
main target.
One of the best critics of Six Characters, Pirandello's
biographer Gaspare Giudice, has advised against looking
for any "main target" in the play. He has pointed out that a
dozen main targets have been cited by as many eminent
critics, and none is more than a theme mentioned in th play
(mostly in the Father's speeches): Which is to say that none
can justly claim to be the theme of the play. Fair enough.
The target I have in mind is, however, not one of those
themes nor any other theory or thesis: It is deep suffering,
not just the suffering of family life, though that is the
innermost of the concentric circles, but the suffering
brought about by interaction of family with others with the
audience, the various audiences. The world is theatre, but
theatre, too, is theatre: We, the spectators at a performance
of Six Characters in Search of an Author, are not excluded
from the suffering, even though we experience it with a
difference.
When I saw the play in recent years in more countries
than one, I suffered not at all. There was fun (comedy) there
was thought (drama of ideas), there was torrential eloquence
and pyrotechnic wordplay, but the main target was missed.
The performers failed to plumb the depth of suffering, and
so the audience not only didn't suffer (in its own appropriate
way), it also never learned the ful import of the suffering.
The suffering in modern drama from Ibsen to Tennessee
Williams and Arthur Miller is neurotic suffering: The image
is of man as a neurotic. Pirandello has a sense of a suffering
that is, so to speak metaphysical: Man is maladjusted to the
universe, and it hurts. That comes too close, perhaps, to
being just an idea and Pirandello never lingered long with
'lust ideas." He had a sense, not just an idea, of trouble
going deeper than neurosis. Psychosis? For lack of a better
word one should perhaps accept it, and take a more candid
look at the Father in Six Characters. He is the man with "all
the ideas," but it is as a paranoid that he handles them. Even
the plain story of his life, told in bare outline, is the tale of a
mad man. Take his own account of how he handled his
marriage and the arrival of their child. His only idea of
fatherhood, in practice, is that he should send the baby out
to a wet nurse in the country whose milk will be healthier.
He seems to think women of humble background produce
better milk, but then again he describes his wife as being of
humble background. He's crazy. And his craziness hovers
over everything, for he is the dominant presence of this
play. When the first-night audience in 1921 cried,
"Manicomio!—Madhouse! "' they had hit a bull's eye.
Is the whole family mad, all six of them? Perhaps not.
But theirs is a strange aura, is it not? They seem not merely
bizarre, but unutterably remote, alien, sad, steeped in
mysterious emotion, spooky. The Stepdaughter, a budding
femme fatale, seems to have converted a natural hysteria
into fanatic parricidal hostility. Mother and Son are gone,
far gone. Pirandello can p lay with the idea that they are
undramatizable in that they have retreated so far into their
shells, into alienation, that no writer can get to them. And
the children! There were never stage children like this
before. An infant girl so close to death that all she has to do
is lean over and she's dead.1 A boy at the talkative and
obstreperous age of fourteen who, in this talkiest of plays,
never talks, but instead takes out a gun and kills himself.
Talking of originality, nothing is more original in this
play than the presentation of the two children. A play which
was all dialogue would wipe them out. On stage, in Six
Characters, they are a constant presence and their silence
speaks volumes. And speaks madness. The two kids have
been traumatized and "struck dumb." Their drama must
remain unspoken but, and this is the Pirandellian point, it is
seen. There is an audience for it: the Son. And what are his
credentials? He, too, has refused to talk all evening. He,
too, has wonderful silences. Which seem to build, as the
Mother at last does some of the talking, to, well, what? A
culmination, a climax? Pirandello is the playwright of coitus
interruptus. The story of the Son breaks off, and the Author
we are in search of ends his play, at least the carefully
reconsidered 1925 version, with a "classic" tableau of
Father, Mother, and Son. (The young children are dead. The
Stepdaughter is on her way out)
When the play is over, you may begin to wonder just
who and what these six people are. Are they really oniy
"characters in search of an author"? A troublesome question
since not all of them seek to do any such searching, and the
notion is a fantasy anyway, almost an allegory. Signifying
what? That the writer, Luigi Pirandello, often sat in his
room at dusk and had the feeling intruders were present, and
that they were book or play characters, asking him to write
about them and give them context and, with context,
orientation and status? Which would make him a real
Author like the God of medieval Catholicism, the head of an
authoritative, the authoritative, hierarchy. But then this was
29
just what he did not feel. Quite the contrary Pirandello is the
poet of a post-Nietzschean world in which God, especially
that God, has been dead for some time. Yes, the Characters
have offered him a role, but, no, he cannot play it.
The flat, unallegorical truth is opposite to the fantasy.
Characters do not really search for him. He, as writer,
searches for them and, if they exist, he gave them that
existence. The fantasy is quite a curious one, is it not?
Zany? Should one say: mad? It would mean our play is mad
through and through, characters, author, and all. Making the
whole thing a disordered phantasmagoria, almost a
Walpurgis Night. This thought brings us to the question of
structure.
A dream play such as this can seem—and many have
found, it so—totally unstructured, formless, a string of all
too loosely connected images and thoughts: chaos depicted
chaotically. Pirandello liked to say he was born in chaos
because he really was born in a Sicilian spot named Kaos.
Fear of chaos—fear that, in Shakespearean phrase, chaos
would "come again" - may be said to underlie all his work.
Which has brought friendly scholars to the rescue with
a theory that the apparent disorder of Six Characters is
really a new and different form of order. For more than two
thousand years, order in drama had been seen through
Aristotelian eyes. Drama presented the imitation (mimesis)
of an action and of life: Life had a certain logic to it, and a
dramatic action had a beginning, middle, and end.
Pirandello can be said to have changed all this in a drama
where what is imitated is not life, or an ordered action, but
another drama. For what may appear to some to be "life" is
actually just another drama, all the world being a stage, and
all 'lie men and women merely players. Pirandello (we are
being told) has replaced mimesis with "meta-mimesis."
In this same period, the nineteen-twenties, Bertolt
Brecht concluded that his plays were non-Aristotelian and
would require a brand-new theory of drama - Epic Theatre to define and justify them.
Did either playwright really need such revisionism? As
far as Six Characters is concerned, one should not fail to
see, behind the seemingly unstructured flow of images and
statements, the simplest three-act structure, and, if it is
concealed "behind" something, that concealment is tally
explained within the play itself: The play of the Six, the
play-in-the-making, does not yet have acts, for it is not yet
written , just as its characters do not yet have names, but are
offering themselves in the standard roles of Mother, Father
et al. (Actually in the dialogue, names are occasionally
introduced.)
Three act plays, turned out by the thousands in Paris,
were standard in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Act One: beginning. Act Two: middle. Act Three: end. Act
One: Exposition and Introduction. Act Two: Development
on a rising curve, possibly to a big climax and stunning
curtain line. Act Three: The Upshot, which, in the tragic
tradition was Catastrophe, in the comic tradition,
Denouement. Modern specialty: the Tragi-comic ending
(somewhere between Catastrophe and Denouement).
Now this tight, symmetrical construction is just what
the story of the Six does not have. They would expect their
author to impose it: That is what authors are for. And
though the would-be author on this stage, namely the
Director, hopes to impose it, he does not come anywhere
near to succeeding. The author who succeeds is Luigi
Pirandello, and he does so by locating the action in the
interplay between Characters and Actors. This is the drama
that is, and oh so carefully, introduced in the first section;
carried to a kind of climax (a kind of anti-climax) in the
second section, where the scene in the whorehouse is
enacted (not quite enacted, is the Pirandellian touch); and
developed in the third section to several conclusions (death
of the kids, exposure of the son, termination of the
experiment by the Director). And there may be said to be a
tiny Epilogue which is also a Prologue and the story of the
Six could now begin again. (I have been using the word
"section" because they are not marked as acts except in
English translations that take liberties. Their boundaries are
quite clearly indicated in Pirandello's stage directions.)
This structural integration yields what Aristotle called
unity of action, a feature that his later disciples linked with
unity of time and place. All three unities are strictly
observed in Six Characters, and the unity of place is
restricted, well beyond Aristotle's reckoning, to the boards
of the theatre we are in. So this most original of plays is, in
some important respects, quite traditional. Pirandello was a
leading figure in the European avant-garde of the nineteentwenties—a time, perhaps the only time, when there really
was an avant-garde. Not the least daring element in his
avant-garde imagination was his retention of a traditional
idea of Theatre. Like Jean Giraudoux, he also belonged to a
theatre d'arriere garde.
Eric Bentley. (1998). “A Translator’s Introduction.” Six
Characters in Search of an Author. New York: Signet
Classic.
Notes
1. At the age of five he watched his little brother fall into a
wash-basin and drown; he lost his sight at seven." This
is from a New Yorker article dated Septeber 5,1997,
about Ray Charles. In Pirandello's play, a boy watches
his little sister fall into the shallow basin of a fountain
and drown. He goes right out of his mind. His eyes
glaze.
30
episodes are re-enacted by the tormented and disputing
characters in order to show the actors what the story is.
When the suicide of the little boy comes up again, by a sort
of hellish eternal recurrence, all breaks up in confusion—
the fictive characters more real, in their conscious suffering,
than the flesh-and-blood acting company.
The story of the six characters, as we gradually make it
out, is melodramatic and sensational. The disputes which
break out from time to time about "idea and reality," "life
and art," and the like, are based on paradoxes in the Shavian
manner: romantically unresolved ambiguities. The whole
work may seem, at first sight, to be shop-worn in its ideas
and, in its dramaturgy, hardly more than a complex piece of
theatrical trickery. When it first appeared, in 1921, some
critics were disposed to dismiss it in this way. But the fine
productions which it received all over the world gradually
revealed its true power and interest, which is not in the
literal story of the characters, nor in the bright, paradoxical
play of ideas, but in the original sense of action underlying
the whole play. Pirandello has explained all this with great
clarity in the preface he wrote in 1930 for the ninth edition.
This preface is almost as important as the play. It deserves
to rank with Cocteau's Call to Order and Eliot's Dialogue
on Dramatic Poetry as one of the works which endeavor to
lay the basis for a contemporary theory of drama.
The action of the play is "to take the stage"—with all
that this suggestive phrase implies. The real actors and the
director want to take it for the realistic purposes—vain or
(with the box-office in mind) venal—of their rehearsal.
Each of the characters wants to take it for the rationalized
myth which is, or would be, his very being. Pirandello sees
human life itself as theatrical: as aiming at, and only to be
realized in, the tragic epiphany. He inverts the convention
of modern realism; instead of pretending that the stage is
not the stage at all, but the familiar parlor, he pretends that
the familiar parlor is not real, but a stage, containing many
"realities." This is, of course, a narrow and violently idealist
view of human life and action; but if held with Pirandello's
strict consistency, it cuts deep—very much as the narrow
idea of the Baroque theater, to which it is so closely akin,
cuts deep, enabling a Racine to search and reveal the heart.
Certainly it is a version of action which enables Pirandello
to bring the stage itself alive at levels of awareness far
beyond those of modern realism.
By the time Pirandello wrote the preface to his play,
he had had time to read criticisms of it from all over the
world, and to discover how its audiences had interpreted it.
These audiences were trained in the modes of understanding
of modern realism, and they almost automatically assumed
that the point of the play was in the literal story of the
characters, and that Pirandello's new idea therefore was
simply a new way to present the sordid tale. If so, then the
play would be only another melodrama on the edge of
psychopathology. It is this interpretation which Pirandello is
at pains to reject first of all. "Now it must be understood
that for me it is not enough to represent the figure of a man
or a woman, however special or strongly marked, for the
mere pleasure of representing it," he writes; "to tell a story
Action as Theatrical:
Six Characters in
Search of an Author
By Francis Fergusson
There is a kinship between what I have called the
Shavian theatricality, especially as it emerges in the later
plays, and the much deeper, more consistent and more
objective theatrical forms of Luigi Pirandello. Shaw as
theater artist seems to have been feeling for something
which Pirandello achieved: the restoration of the ancient
magic of "two boards and a passion," frankly placed in the
glare of the stage lights and the eye of the audience. In both
theaters, the human is caught rationalizing there in the
bright void. But Pirandello, having the seriousness of the
artist, presents this farcical-terrible vision with finality and
in an integral theatrical form; while in Shaw's complex case
the artist is always being thwarted by the drawing-room
entertainer or dismissed as romantic by the Fabian optimist
or the morally fit man of good will. It is therefore Pirandello
that one must study in order to see how the contemporary
idea of a theater (as held by its most accomplished masters)
emerged from nineteenth century Realism and
Romanticism, including and transcending those genres as
well as Shaw's solitary farce-of-rationalizing.
Six Characters is a convenient example of Pirandello's
art: his most famous work, and his first unqualified success.
I here remind the reader of the main outlines of its plot.
When the play begins, the curtain is up, the set is
stacked against the stage-wall, and a troupe of actors with
their director is rehearsing a new play by Pirandello. The
rehearsal is interrupted by the arrival of a family in deep
mourning: Father, Mother, grown Daughter and Son, and
two younger children. These are the "characters"—fictions
of the imagination of an author who has refused to write
their story—and they have come to get their story or their
drama somehow realized. They ask the actors to perform it
instead of the play by Pirandello which they had started to
rehearse. From this point, the play develops on several
levels of make-believe. There is the struggle of the
"characters" against the actors and their director, who find
the story confusing, or boring, or not good box-office.
There is the more savage struggle between the various
characters, who cannot agree about the shape, the meaning,
or even the facts of their story, for each has rationalized, or
mythicized it, in his own way. A few sordid facts emerge:
the Father had sent the Mother away to live with another
man, whom, he thought, she would love better, and the three
younger children are hers by this other man. Hovering near
the family, watching its life at a little distance, the Father
had met his wife's Daughter at a house of assignation,
Madame Pace's dress shop. Complicated jealousies had
developed among the four children of the double brood,
culminating in the suicide of the little boy. The crucial
31
(gay or sad) for the mere pleasure of telling it; to describe a
landscape for the mere pleasure of describing it." When the
story of the characters first occurred to him, it was in this
realistic form; and as such it did not seem to him to be, as
yet, the material of art, which must be "more philosophical
than history." He was, in fact, through with modern realism:
the literal scene, the actual individuals, and the sensational
events of individual lives, no longer seemed to have any
form or meaning. But when he sensed the analogy between
his problem as an artist and the problems of his tormented
characters who were also seeking form and meaning, he had
the clue to his new theatrical form, and to the peculiar sense
of human action (as itself theatrical) which this form was to
realize. His inspiration was to stop the film of his characters'
lives; to play over and over again some crucial episode in
this sequence; to dispute its form and meaning on the public
stage. By this means he found a mode of action which he,
and the actors, and the characters, and the audience could
all share by analogy, and which could thus be the clue to
formal relationships and a temporal order. And he lifted the
action, as it were, from the realm of fact and sensation, of
eavesdropping and the curious intrigue, to the more
disinterested realm of contemplation. "Always on opening
the book we shall find the living Francesca confessing her
sweet sin to Dante," Pirandello explains; "and if we return a
hundred thousand times in succession to reread that
passage, a hundred thousand times in succession Francesca
will utter words, never repeating them mechanically, but
speaking them every time for the first time with such a
living and unforeseen passion that Dante, each time, will
swoon when he hears them. Everything that lives, by the
very fact that it lives, has form, and by that same fact must
die, except the work of art, which precisely lives forever, in
so far as it is form." Francesca's life, as developing
potentiality, is stopped at the moment when her peculiar
destiny is realized. And it is the crucial moments in the
tangled lives of his characters—the moment in Pace's dressshop, the pistol—shot in the garden—which must be played
over with the vitality of improvisation, "as though for the
first time," yet because they are played over, lifted to the
realm of contemplation—it is these moments which the
characters must interrogate in the light of the stage, as we
all must mull over (though in secret) the moments when our
nature and destiny are defined.
I have explained that Chekhov, in his way, also to
some degree transcended the limits of modern realism: by
selecting only those moments of the characters' lives, to
show on-stage, when they are most detached from the literal
facts and the stultifying rationalizations of the daily
struggle. But in Chekhov these moments are suffered in
abstraction from thought and purpose, and so his image of
human action may seem too pathetic. He lacks both Ibsen's
powerful moral-intellectual will and Shaw's fitness-in-thevoid. But Pirandello, by means of his fiction of unwritten
characters, can show the human creature both as suffering
and as willfully endeavoring to impose his rationalization.
This fiction-of-fictive-characters enables him to play over
his catastrophes; and it was this resource which the realistic
stage denied to Ibsen. When his Mrs. Alving, in Ghosts
suddenly sees Oswald's infatuation with Regina as a return
of her husband's infatuation with Regina's mother, she gets
the passionate but disinterested intuition which is the
material of art, and is rewarded with the poetic vision that
"we are all ghosts." But her final catastrophe—Oswald's
collapse—strikes her for the first time only, and so remains,
when the curtain falls, undigested and sensational.
Pirandello's inspiration is to stop the action with Mrs.
Alving's scream, and to play it over, in the actual light of the
stage, the imagined lamp—and dawn-light of Mrs. Alving's
parlor, and the metaphysical light of her, and our, need for
some form and meaning.
Pirandello is at pains to explain, in his preface, that his
play transcends not only modern realism, but also the
various romantic genres with which some critics had
confused it. The characters may be romantic, he says, but
the play is not. The Daughter, for instance, when she takes
the stage with her song, her deep feeling, and her abandoned
charm, would like to seduce us into her own world of
passion, as "the old magician Wagner" does in Tristan. But
the scene is the stage itself, not her inner world; and her
action meets perforce the actions of other characters who
also claim the stage. Pirandello might also have said, with
equal correctness, that his play transcends the Shavian
irony, and at the same time realizes the farce of rationalizing
with a depth and a consistency beyond that of Shaw. The
Father, for instance, has a taste for the paradoxical platform,
the unresolved ambiguity, and the logical consistency on the
irrational premise, which reminds one strongly of Shaw. But
he is present as a "real Character" first, and a rationalized
platform second; hence we can believe in his sufferings as
well as in his conceptualizing—and see both in a scene
wider than either. The basis in reality of the Shavian farce
appears, at last, to be iii Shaw's own gi ft" of abstract fitness
and verbal agility; but Pirandello, in the stage itself and in
our need not only to rationalize but to mythicize, has found
a wider basis, on which many versions of human action may
be shown together to the eye of contemplation.
There would be much to say of the extraordinary
theatrical fertility of Pirandello's plot. The basic situation—
the characters claiming the stage for their incommensurable
tragic epiphanies, the actors claiming it for the marketable
entertainment they are trying to make—has both comic and
tragic aspects, and Pirandello exploits both, shifting from
one to the other with perfect mastery. The situation, fictive
though it admittedly is, has the firmness and clarity, once
we have accepted it, of Racinian tragedy or Molieresque
comedy. And just because it is so firm and unmistakable
there is great freedom within it: it may be explored and
developed with the apparent spontaneity of circus-clowning,
the alertness and endless surprises of the Commedia
Dell'Arte, where the actors improvised a performance on the
broad clear basis of the plots of Latin comedy. The scenes
may break into confusion—into philosophical arias and
disputes; into laughter; into violence—but we are never lost.
The stage, and the need to take the stage, frame the action
as a mirror might, which no amount of grimacing can
32
destroy—or like the ampulla in which the sibyl hangs,
wishing to die, in the epigraph to The Waste Land. It is the
static quality of this basic situation which is both its triumph
and its limitation; and in order to understand it more fully,
one must also think of some of its limitations.
I have remarked that the play is always breaking down
in disputes about the idea and the reality or, more generally,
art and life. It is in these issueless disputes that the
Pirandellesque brilliance most closely resembles the
Shavian brilliance; and indeed the unresolvable paradox on
which they are based is like the basis of the "free" Shavian
irony. But Pirandello, unlike Shaw, transcends his
paradoxes by accepting them as final—or rather (since he
does not, like Shaw, see human action as rationalizing only,
and the world as merely conceptualized) he accepts his
paradoxes as various versions of a final split in human
nature and destiny itself. In the same way Racine, accepting
the split between reason and passion as final, thereby
transcends it: i.e., transforms it into an object of
contemplation. Pirandello's version of this tragic
contradiction (after the endless explorations of modern
realism and romanticism) is more general than Racine's, and
his concept of art is (after modern idealism) deeper and
wider than Racine's raison, which corresponds to it.
Pirandello's utter darkness of unformed Life (or elan vital,
or Wille, or libido) is perhaps even more savage and less
human than Racine's passion. Pirandello is not limited, like
Racine, to the rigid scene of the enlightened moral will; he
can present characters of various degrees of heroism and
enlightenment; and, as I have remarked, he can accept and
exploit the comic as well as the tragic aspects of his basic
contradiction. Nevertheless, his tragedy is a limited, an
invented, an artificial tragedy, on the same principle as
Racine's; and in the same way it offers to the eye of the
mind the eternity of the perfect, and perfectly tragic
artifact—the human damned in his realization—instead of
the transcendence of the tragic rhythm, which eschews the
final clarity and leaves the human both real and mysterious.
One may also understand the limitations of
Pirandello's theater by thinking again of its relation to
modern realism. I have said that he "inverts" the scene of
modern realism, and thus vastly increases the
suggestiveness and the possible scope of the stage itself. But
of course he does not, by this device, provide the chaotic
modern world with a "theater" of action in the ancient sense.
One might justly say that his attitude is more "realistic"—
more disillusioned and disbelieving—than simple-minded
positivism itself, for he does not have to believe in the
photograph of the parlor, and he can accept the actual stage
for the two boards it is. But he is left, like Ibsen and
Chekhov, with neither an artistic convention like the
Baroque, nor a stable scene of human life like the Greek or
Elizabethan cosmos; and, like Ibsen and Chekhov, he has
only the plot as a means of defining his action. The
inspiration of Six Characters is thus not only the view of
action as theatrical but the plot-device whereby this vision
may be realized: the brilliant notion of making his
protagonists unwritten "characters" and setting them to
invade a stage. This plot is so right, so perfect, that it almost
exhausts, and certainly obscures, the deeper insights into
life and the theater which it realizes. Hence the natural
though unjustified tendency to think of the play as a brilliant
plot idea, a piece of theatrical trickery only, and so miss its
deep and serious content. The complete dependence of the
play upon its plot-idea constitutes a limitation; but it points
to the fundamental problem of the modern theater, which no
individual can solve alone.
Pirandello was quite right to think of his characters as
being like Dante's Francesca. They too are caught and
confined in the timeless moment of realizing their individual
nature and destiny, and so imprisoned, damned, as she is.
This vision has great authority. It develops naturally out of
several diverse versions of the modern theater which I have
mentioned, those of Ibsen, Wagner, and Shaw. At the same
time it is deeply rooted in the Italian temperament and
natural theatricality; and it revives crucial elements in the
great theater of the Baroque. It is close to the author's place
and to his times, which we share; yet one must remember
that it takes as all-inclusive, as the whole story of human
nature and destiny, a mode of action and understanding
which Dante thought of as maimed, and which he presented
in the realm of those who have lost, not the intellect, but the
good of the intellect: il ben dello intelletto.
The most fertile property of Pirandello's dramaturgy is
his use of the stage itself. By so boldly accepting it for what
it is, he freed it from the demand which modern realism had
made of it, that it be a literal copy of scenes off-stage, and
also from the exorbitant Wagnerian demand, that it be an
absolutely obedient instrument of hypnosis in the power of
the artist. Thus he brought to light once more the wonderful
property which the stage does have: of defining the
primitive and subtle medium of the dramatic art. "After
Pirandello"—to take him symbolically rather than
chronologically—the way was open for Yeats and Lorca,
Cocteau and Eliot. The search could start once more for a
modern poetry of the theater, and even perhaps for an idea
of the theater comparable to that of the Greeks yet tenable
in the modern world.
Francis Fergusson (1949). “Action as Theatrical: Six
Characters in Search of an Author.” The Idea of a Theater.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
33
content to apply to human psychology. Ibsen's destruction
of the illusion of an intact and indissoluble human
personality had occurred in a play and on a stage which, on
the whole, hardly differed from those of the preceding
“illusionist” period. By going one step further, by imposing
and practising these principles upon the hitherto unified
whole of the art form of theatre itself, Pirandello
destroyed—always within his humorous creed—the form
and structure of the play itself. Here lies the true
significance of Pirandello's statement concerning the
importance of Uno, nessuno e centonila for his theatre: as
the novel's main theme is the dissolution of personality, so it
also destroys and leads ad absurdum the very form of the
genre it uses. These are, in fact, the “extreme conclusions”
Pirandello alluded to in the interview mentioned earlier. In
this sense, Pirandello had raised the issue of a nonAristotelian drama long before Brecht.
The dissolution on the structural level of the form of
the play was not in itself a Pirandellian invention. The
Stationendrama, the piece built on a rapid succession of
tableaux rather than on acts, had been used by Goethe and
Buchner; Ibsen's Peer Gynt and Strindberg's Till Damaskus
were more immediate examples to hand. Moreover, such a
form is essentially not very different from the mediaeval
simultaneous stage. Yet Pirandelld availed himself of it with
the specific intent to destroy and make absurd any logical
concatenation from within—not simply in order to demolish
an outer form. What lay behind this was the categorical
rejection of one of the hitherto sacred characteristics of
drama, its intentional finality. Again we see Pirandello's
humorist conviction that any such design would be a mere
construction or fabrication. The humorist's attention to the
particolari piú intimi e minuti of life conflicts with any
greater, unified, and “organized” design. In this also,
Pirandello anticipated Brecht who later explicitly stated that
the rejection of an intentional finality was one of the main
characteristics of his epic theatre: “Epic drama, which is
materialistically oriented and is little interested in empathy
investments on the part of its audience, strictly speaking
knows no goal but only an end, and it knows of another type
of necessity in which the course of things may not only take
place in a straight line but also in curves, even in leaps.”
Foremost among the devices Pirandello used to
dissolve the form of the play on the structural level was the
theatre-within-the-theatre technique. Again, this technique is
in itself, like the Stationendrama, an ancient and venerable
device; yet Pirandello uses it deliberately to destroy the
form of the piece and any logical concatenation of events,
of cause and effect, it might imply. He does not intend
merely to show the audience how a play is put together, but
to insinuate the internal play in such a way as to fuse in
some measure stage and audience. In plays of this nature
(with which we have become more familiar since) the
playwright makes the audience feel as if they are in the
same “world” with the performers in the external play. In
other words, we first look at the internal play by watching
the actors (in the external play) carry on the mechanics of
rehearsal while bickering among themselves, etc. But
Pirandello and Modern Drama
By Giovanni Gentile
More matter with less art. - Shakespeare
Dab man sich von Gesetzen losmacht, die blob
dutch Tradition geheiligt sind, dagegen ist nichts
zu sagen; abet dab man nicht denkt, es mjissen
doch Gesetze sein, die aus det Natut jedet Kunst
entsptingen, datan denkt niemand.
- Goethe
In an interview given in July 1922 Pirandello said that
Uno, nessuno e centomila—being a novel about the
dissolution of personality—really should have come as a
foreword and introduction to his theatre; under the
circumstances, however, it would have to serve as the
summary and epitome of it. The fact that the novel reached
such extreme conclusions was, he suggested, the reason for
this conviction.
This pronouncement was made when Pirandello's
success on the stage was secure and when he doubtless
considered himself to be foremost a playwright, although he
had maintained over and over before, in his true “humorist”
fashion, that theatre did not really interest him. The,
importance later attributed by Pirandello to the plays of his
theatre-within-the-theatre trilogy (printed first in his
definitive theatre collection) reveals—if only in disguise—
what he actually thought his contribution to modern theatre
to be: just as his novel had destroyed the concept of plot and
of form with its continuous dedoublement and breaking of
illusion, so also had he changed the face of theatre. The
mere theme alone of a multifaceted and by no means
uniform personality which the novel postulated was not a
Pirandellian invention, yet he had imposed this principle
upon the form of theatre itself. Ibsen's drama had already
destroyed the illusion of “the” human personality;
Strindberg and Pirandello in a sense only adopted this
procedure and concern as their central theme. Pirandello's
coolness and, at times, open hostility to Ibsen may be traced
to this anticipation. In an article published as early as 1893,
Pirandello had maintained, with reference to Ibsen, that in
the world of the arts, it was enough to appear
incomprehensible in order to attract the crowd of the
confused, just as flies were drawn by a spit; and he asked,
“What does this Norwegian want here among us ?”
What Pirandello most criticized in this early article
was the aesthetic 'disgregation' of the new age. Yet, it is
precisely this aspect which is most conspicuous in his own
work, and which, in his drama, is most apparent in the plays
of the theatre-within-the-theatre trilogy (Sei personaggi in
cerca d'autore, Ciascuno a sno modo, Questa sera si recita
a soggetto). Pirandello's own specific contribution to, and
originality in, the modern theatre should be seen in the fact
that he imposed upon the art form of theatre itself these
principles of analytic decomposition which Ibsen was still
34
suddenly the “stage manager” rushes down the aisle of the
theatre to object to something within the play. In doing this,
he is, in effect, putting himself completely on the level of
the audience, that of a genuine spectator; and at the same
time he is elevating the audience to his level as actors in the
external play. All this, of course, makes us active
participants, and we are no longer watching so much as
emotionally participating. In the process we lose our
objectivity towards the external play (which is actually the
piece of art that must convey the experience) and become
emotionally involved to the point where our critical sense is
eclipsed.
Yet we go to the theatre not to see re-enacted a scene
from life, an experience we may have had in our own lives,
but rather to see this experience re-enacted in such a way
that we may become aware of its essence, of what it
represents on the scale of human values. If we are
participants in this experience, then and there, our emotions
become such that the essences are lost on us. In other words
art should “illuminate” life, not reflect it. This of course
requires that the artist, the playwright, maintain a perspective, allowing his audience to derive an experience from the
artistic product rather than to clutter it up with what all too
often have become phoney gimmicks.
There are, of course, earlier forms of drama which
made use of this technique, yet they always maintained a
clear distinction between the two cells of theatre: stage and
audience. Such a rapprochement of theatre and life, of stage
and audience, was indeed a tempting theme for an age such
as the baroque which was so deeply rooted in an antithetical
Weltanschauung, and which saw human life and existence
as el gran teatro del mundo. We only need look at Lope de
Vega's Lo fingido nerdadero, at Jean Rotrbu's Le veritable
Saint Genest, to become aware of such a concern. Yet even
Elizabethan theatre, which made a most extensive use of the
theatre-within-the-theatre technique, maintains a clear
perspective and does not avail itself of the technique to fuse
and blend the two worlds. Thus, Ben Jonson's spectator
personifications form only a frame within which the real
play goes on; they merely create a reflective attitude on the
part of the audience (Every Man Out of His Humour, The
Staple of News, Magnetic Lad). Even Beaumont and
Fletcher's all-out satire The Knight of the Burning Pestle,
where the commentators are not personifications, but are
drawn from the parterre to partake in the play, observes a
strict separation of the fictive from the real audience.
Besides, two further aspects differentiate it from a modern
theatrical play: the characters of the frame piece never talk
to the main actors, even though at times they parenthetically
address remarks to them, nor do they talk to Ralph once he
has assumed his role. They are always answered by the
speaker of the prologue or by a supernumerary. By thus
keeping the internal and external play separate, there is
maintained a considerable degree of clarity. The same
separation between reality and illusion is kept in
Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream.
The major difference, then, between such plays and
contemporary experiments in total theatricality seems to be
that the older plays make the audience more deeply aware
of the two worlds, of theatre and life, stage and audience.
They draw upon theatricality to a high degree, but in doing
so they merely render the audience more conscious of the
anatomy of the whole, without pretending to eliminate it.
Where experiment was taken further, as in the German
Romantic theatre of Ludwig Tieck, it became clear that such
tendencies led away from any real and workable theatre,
indeed to an abolition of theatre proper. This was, after all,
Friedrich Schiegel's point when he remarked on Tieck's Der
gestiefelte Kater, that the cat was as if strolling on the roof
of dramatic art. Not wholly without reason has Pirandello
been linked with Tieck and his ironical-satirical literary
comedies. In his discussion of Tieck's Der gestieftlte Kater
and Pirandello's Sei personaggi, Guido Mazzoni stressed
that parallels were merely external and that the two plays
were totally different in spirit. Yet the question here,
precisely, is not one of content, but of form, and Mazzoni
had to concede that much in Pirandello's theatre indeed
suggested a continuation of such Romantic experiments.
More important than any earlier instances of
innovation is Pirandello's new total engagement in, and
devotion to, principles that changed the face of drama.
Thus, Schnitzler's Der grune Kakadu, for example,
preceding Pirandello's Questa sera si recita a soggetto by
some thirty years, presents a psychological situation
analogous to that of Pirandello's theatre-within-the-theatre
pieces; but an important difference lies in the form, for in
Schnitzler's play—eminently theatrical piece that it is—the
mingling of reality and illusion, of theatre and life, takes
place on stage, whereas, with Pirandello, it already engulfs
the real audience.
Again, the aspect of intentional finality, to which
Brecht later was to object so strongly, and which already
played a considerable role in Pirandello's concepts, was of
concern to the Expressionists. To try to establish a
precedence here is a difficult and, moreover, an idle task.
Theatre may have taken its cue from the film, as Hauser
suggests; yet preoccupation with the time element and the
idea of breaking away from the concept of a time
meaningful only in a successive cause and effect
relationship were as common in the other arts. Granted that
the establishment of one common denominator for Space
and Time, and of their equality, was one of the conventions
of the film, it was an Expressionist maxim as well. It is in
this sense that Paul Kornfield claimed that situations might
even be inverted in plots as a reaction against a psychology
that had degraded itself to becoming the doctrine of the
causal connections of human functions and instincts. Thus,
inversion of causal relations has indeed become a stock
feature of modern drama, and Andrè Obey's Revenue de
l'Étole is only one of many conspicuous examples.
In the circumstances, it would seem therefore that the
refusal to conceive of events in a cause and effect
relationship had deeper implications and was not a simple
borrowing from other arts; it had actually been long
prepared by psychological as well as philosophical insights
and perceptions. Bergson who already in his thesis had
35
suggested the usefulness for aesthetics of William James's
ideas, stated there himself that “time, understood in the
sense of a milieu where one distinguishes and counts, is
nothing else but space”. Such ideas, as well as his later
expounded simultanéité des etats d'âme, were not without
repercussions in literature. Proust's works as well as
Thomas Mann's Zauberberg both reflect the preoccupation
of contemporary philosophy with time. As for drama,
Priestley, for instance, acknowledges indebtedness to
Ouspensky's work A New Model of the Universe; and the
impact of Bergson's ideas is implicit in the theoretical
pronouncements of many playwrights besides Brecht.
Pirandello's tendency to dissolve the dramatic form is
evident especially in his fusion and blending of reality and
illusion, of internal and external plays, of action and
reflection on it, and in a constant shifting between these
different levels. In many of Pirandello's plays the story as
such is of only circumstantial importance and serves merely
as a theme to be elaborated on; in short, it is used to prove a
point which is not at all connected with the fabric of the plot
itself. His pre-eminently analytical approach dominates the
plays of his theatre-within-the-theatre trilogy. In Sei
personaggi the action is continuously interrupted by
comments paralleling it, the characters themselves are
drawn as types, and the stage directions even recommend
that they wear masks. Their story is only incidental to the
more important aspect of the play, the clash and exchange
between the two worlds of art and life. It has been said that
Pirandello either did not dare to give the naked story of the
characters, or was not able or willing to present it on the
stage with total dramatic realism—as he had thought of
doing in the beginning; that to represent it indirectly, by
reflection and reason, was a pis aller. Whatever secondary
considerations there may have been, it is clear that the
primary aim of his dramatic writing is, as always, to forego
direct representation and explosive action, in favour of the
indirect approach of a reflective presentation of the filtered
issues, as it were. Here, too, Pirandello follows his
humanistic theory which implies a reflective attitude and
postulates an analytical frame of mind.
In Ciascuno a suo modo, this analytical preoccupation
comes out even more clearly in that the dialectical approach
is carried to the point where action and ensuing reflection
on it are already sharply defined in the outer form of the
play: after each of the two acts, there follow intermezzi
corali in which the preceding action is discussed, and as a
“result” of this doubling and mirroring the third act does not
even take place. The last play of the trilogy, Questa sera si
recita a soggetto, draws the consequences of this approach;
it no longer makes any pretence at taking seriously the play
within the play: the director, Dr. Hinkfuss, has his actors
improvise on a scenario—a short story by Pirandello.
Whereas in Sei personaggi it was the director who
interrupted, and commented on, the action, and in Ciascuno
a suo modo the critics got their chance in the intermezzi,
here in Questa sera si recita a soggetto it is the actors
themselves who comment upon their own play. An excellent
example of this is the scene in the third act where
Sampognetta, after bickering with the director, comments
upon his own acting and from there slips into his role
unawares, as it were, suddenly changing over to the present
tense:
But I was to say these things drunk, in a delirium;
and I was to pass with my blood-stained hands
over my face — thus — and spatter it with blood
[He asks his colleagues:]
Is it bloody?
[And as they nod:]
Well
[And he goes on:]
and frighten you and make you cry — but really
cry—with my breath which I am losing.
The analytical aspect is stressed to such a point here
that it has been said that Pirandello was in fact attempting a
phenomenology of theatre in these plays. “Drama”,
dramatic action, is thus no longer the goal, but only an
accessory. Such a tendency is also evident in many other
plays where the “drama” already has happened, and what is
being presented on the stage is only its aftermath:
Characters who argue, analyse, and discuss previous
happenings. It is evident that Pirandello's strength and
preference lie in the dialectic aspect of tight reasoning, and
not so much in an action-packed stage. Writing in 1935 to
his American critic, Domenico Vittorini, Pirandello
complained about the numerous Pirandellos that the world
of international criticism had put into circulation, and above
all he took issue with the one that was all head and no heart,
repeating the oft-quoted image in his writing of “that
infernal pump which is—the machine of logic”. Yet, in his
true humorist fashion, he was not at all disinclined to be
called an intellectual playwright. Thus, in the foreword to
Sei personaggi Pirandello said that he had the misfortune of
belonging to the class of writers who were of a
philosophical nature, and Eric Bentley quotes him as
asserting that, whereas the old drama had as its basis
passion, the distinct characteristic of the new would be the
expression of the intellect. Nevertheless, Pirandello, in the
same remark, went on to claim that one of the novelties he
personally had introduced to modern drama was the
conversion of the intellect into passion. In true Pirandellian
fashion both things are true, and Bentley stated this
succinctly when he said that in Pirandello passion and
intellect were torturing each other.
Wherever action does occur on the stage, Pirandello
betrays some difficulty in handling—“orchestrating”—his
characters within the framework of larger scenes. This may
result from the age-old Italian habit of relying on leading
actors (German critics saw this as the major difference
between Pirandello's ensemble of the Teatro d'arte and the
Moscow Art Theatre, after both groups had performed in
Berlin), and thus may to some extent have a practical origin.
Many of Pirandello's plays indeed received their final form
on the stage or were conditioned by his practical stage
experience. Yet the deeper reason must be seen Pirandello's
36
infatuation with a dialectic approach, ensuing tight dialogue,
and his preference for arguing and reasoning.
Such analytic discursiveness, of course, follows the
general line of his humouristic viewpoint and approach. Yet
here, too, specific Pirandellian predispositions and
predilections coincided with, and drew encouragement
from, other contemporary forms of drama. Undoubtedly,
Pirandello owed a great deal to the Teatro del grottesco
which flourished in the late 1910's, even if only by way of
confirmation of already existing latent tendencies. This type
of theatre is primarily reflective and analytical, and it, too,
uses the dramatic merely as an accessory. Whatever
dramatic elements it may contain are not genuinely its own,
but belong as Pellizzi pointed out—precisely to the types of
theatre which it seeks to deform, criticize, and destroy.
With Pirandello, too, action and final outcome of the
play are thus often not at all important since they are
relevant only in so far as they are conducive to an analytical
approach. Indicative is Pirandello's own staging of Sei
personaggi in Berlin, where he directed the play at a rapid
and light pace with his own ensemble, whereas Reinhardt
had produced the piece in a heavy tragic setting. Similarly,
in many of Pirandello's plays the audience is left to believe
one version as much as another, which again befits his
humorist-relativist convictions (Cosi' é [se vi pare], Il
berretto a sonagli); or the play does not even finish
(Ciascuno a suo modo). It is also of little importance what
the play may be called (and here, for once, Pirandello and
Croce might find themselves in agreement). Sei personaggi
is a “play in the making”; I giganti della montagna, a
“myth”; L'uomo, Ia bestia e la virtù, a “fable in three acts”;
Cosi é (se vi pare), a “parable in three acts”; Quando si e'
qualcuno, a “performance in three acts”; Trovarsi simply
“three acts”.
Pirandello's humorous “decomposition” of his
impressions into their different elements, from which stems
his aversion to all “composition”, is matched by his
analytical fragmenting of the play. He makes indiscriminate
use of means and countermeans (the humorist's sentimento
del contrano), appealing, on the one hand, to the intellect,
but at the same flme, to emotion, and blurs the vision of the
audience: in fact, passion and intellect torturing each other.
One of Pirandello's ambivalent devices is that of a
stage manager or narrator who directs the play-within-theplay from the audience, and serves thus as a suggestive
agent for “activating” the audience. Critics offer various
opinions on the use of the narrator; Shaw's Saint Joan is
mentioned as an early prototype that employs this device,
and Cocteau's Les Maries de Ia Tour Eiffel has also been
suggested. Yet it is a device with which Romantic
dramaturgy (harking back to the Elizabethans) was already
familiar, and which it employed, albeit with different
intentions. These earlier usages were comic and ironic,
rather than being oriented towards destroying the structural
build-up of the play. Pirandello certainly did not invent the
device, but he uses it for a new purpose.
Another expedient for activating the audience goes a
step further. It places the “spectator-actors” of the play-
within-the-play among the real spectators, thereby extending
the play atmosphere into the auditorium. The classic
example of this, combined with the use of a stage manager
going back and forth between audience and stage, is
Pirandello's Questa sera si recita a soggetto. An idea of
how much the distinction between real audience (the
audience of the external play) and the “play audience” (the
audience of the internal play) has been effaced in this piece,
is already given in the stage directions at the beginning:
“The audience, in the sudden dimming of the lights,
becomes at first attentive; not hearing the gong, however,
which usually announces the rising of the curtain, it begins
to become somewhat agitated...”
The odd situation here is that this actually was not
written for the “play-audience” alone, but also for the real
one, which, of course, is not subject to stage directions at
all, and need not act accordingly. Stylistically, such a
situation would require the future of probability in Italian (si
farà, comincerà) instead of the declarative present
indicative. These minutely elaborated stage directions are a
further indication of Pirandello's essentially undramatic
approach. Not unlike those of the German Romantic theatre,
the connection with Tieck's satirical literaty comedies again
is evident—they are unusually detailed and really are meant
to be read. They also betray the reflective mood and attitude
of this kind of drama. For, as Hofmannsthal once remarked
with reference to Shakespeare (who gives almost nothing in
his stage directions, but all in the dialogue), the more
dramatic qualities a dialogue has, the more it carries with it
the tensions of the atmosphere, and the less it entrusts to
stage directions.
When the “spectator-actors” of Questa sera si recita a
soggetto, distributed throughout the real audience, begin
their play with a discussion of the goings-on behind the
curtain, they simulate and insinuate to the real audience that
they are indeed part of it. Then Dr. Hinkfuss, who has just
entered the theatre, rushes down the aisle to address the
“audience”(the simulated and the real one). His bickering
with the simulated audience (seated among the real one)
insinuates again the whole play atmosphere upon the real
audience. This is heightened to full irony in the scene where
Dr. Hinkfuss purports to quiet the simulated audience by
saying that he could not possibly answer all the questions
asked of him while the play was going on; when one of the
“spectator-actors” objects that the play has not really begun
yet, Dr. Hinkfuss asserts that indeed it has. This might seem
to reach a non plus ultra of identification between audience
and actors, thereby reducing aesthetic distance to a level
where a psychologically differentiated atmosphere is made
impossible.
But the effect is intensified further, not only by having
single “spectator-actors” argue with the stage director, but
also by stressing the collective aspect of these bickerings.
Thus, many stage directions read: “Somebody laughs”,
“Many, in the orchestra seats, box seats, and on the main
floor, laugh”, “People laugh”; and even direct lines are
prescribed for: “A few in the auditorium”, “Others”,
“Voices in the auditorium”. But this is still not enough: Dr.
37
Hinkfuss tells the audience that also in its midst there will
be a performance by the actors on a stage prepared for them
there, indicating, moreover, a direct participation by the
audience (which, in the end, of course, is always the
simulated one): “...and then you all as well will participate
in the play.” Furthermore, he directs attention to the
intermezzo during which the play will he carried into real
life: the actors of the play-within-the-play will perform
simultaneously in separate groups “with the greatest ease”,
intermingled with the real audience in the foyer, “as
spectators among the spectators”. This is the limit of
theatricalization. The actors' space has been made to
coincide with, is the same as, the actual space of the
audience. The play element has been carried into the reality
of life to the point where both seem inextricably
intermingled, thus suggesting, making, proclaiming
theatricality as a form of life.
Yet, in reality, this all is written, and the aspect and
precarious balance of the “as if” must be maintained to
carry the play off. At the Berlin performance in the Lessing
Theater (May 31, 1930), the audience indeed intended to be
part of the game and to perform as well, which caused the
only really improvised scene: the appearance on the stage of
the real director Hans Hartung who shouted insults at the
real audience. The perhaps less temperamental, and
certainly less sophisticated audience of Konigsberg, where
the play had its first performance, in some kina of awe had
taken in its stride “also this joke”.
In an address delivered before the Libre Esthétique of
Brussels, André Gide, elaborating on the relationship of
Life to Theatre, stated: “Where is the mask?—In the
auditorium or on the stage?—In the theatre? or in life?—It
is never only either here or there.” This kaleidoscopic
aspect of the mask is indeed one of the central problems and
concerns of Pirandello's theatre. Yet in his Teatro sul teatro
trilogy he is no longer content to apply this principle in its
social implications as he did in many of his other plays, or
to translate it into the world of art as in the posthumous and
fragmentary “myth” of art, I giganti della montagna. Here,
he wants to achieve a forcible fusion of the two states: the
mask becomes the absolute principle itself. Behind this, of
course, lies the concept of life as theatre, of a mutual interpenetration of the two worlds.
The perspicacious Antonio Gramsci was already aware
of the affinity of Pirandello's ideas with those of Nicolai
Evreinov. Yet, in the theatre-within-the- theatre trilogy, they
appear not in their sociological aspect (e.g., masking or
unmasking of character, as Gramsci, in a more general way,
saw them applied by Pirandello), but serve to launch and
establish some kind of pantheatricalism, to proclaim theatre
as a form of life. Parallel efforts in this direction had been
made for quite some time. Georg Fuchs, whose slogan at the
Munich Kunstler Theater had been Rethéâtraliser le
theâtre, had expressed his ideas on this subject already in
1909; and Hans Vaihinger tried to lay philosophical
foundations in a much broader approach with his
philosophy of the “as if”, which attempted to show the
concept of fiction, of theatricality, as a basic category
operative also in other fields of human endeavour.
Eveinov had developed his philosophy of theatricality
through his association with the Starinnyi Teatr as early as
1908, when he published a first essay on the subject. For
him, theatre originated from the basic human instinct for
transformation and metamorphosis, out of some sort of
protean yearning. He saw the world as permeated by
pantheatricalism, and the artist's duty for him consisted in
an active theatricalization of life. Pirandello's ideas go in the
same direction, and his theoretical thinking as well is
influenced by this concept. Thus, for him, it was not the
actors who had invented the improvisations of the
Comnedia dell'arte, but it was the playwrights who had
become actors, who had lost all their artistic ambitions and
had become attracted by “momentaneous” life.
Evreinov had put these theories into action while
directing plays at Saint Petersburg's Krivoe Zerkalo, where
he experimented for several years beginning in 1911.
Memorable and of importance for the Teatro del grottesco
is his production of Gogol's Revizor (December 11, 1912),
whose beginning scenes he staged in five different styles,
including those of Stanislavskij, Reinhardt and Craig.
Echoes are easily discernible in Italy: Pirandello produced,
in May of 1925, two of Evreinov's works in his own Teatro
d'arte, and a year later, Luigi Antonelli, a Pirandellian and a
writer of grotesque plays, in his piece Il dramma, la
commedia e la farsa treated a subject in the vein of three
different genres. After the revolution, Evreinov gave an
example of his concept of theatricality when he staged the
mass spectacle Vzjatie Zimnego Dvorca in the square in
front of Petrograd's Winter Palace, with some 8,000 extras
and an orchestra of 500 musicians. Such a representation of
a play, historically meaningful and important in the lives of
its actors, is a far cry from Questa sera si recita a soggetto
and its implied therapeutical catharsis, which the couple in
the orchestra seats hardly can conceive of, except as some
kind of bewildering humbug.
We have deliberately chosen Questa sera si recita a
soggetto because this play, perhaps more than any other,
embodies the quintessence of Pirandello's attempts at
analytically dissecting, as it were, the art of theatre. We
would not wish to create the impression that Pirandello's
theatre contains nothing else besides. But his originality lies
in the way he imposed the principles of plurality and
relativity upon the very art form of theatre itself; thereby
questioning its validity while still using it as a medium.
Gramsci maintained that after Pirandello was gone, all
that would remain of much of his theatre would be preGoldonian canvases. He was convinced that Pirandello's
written production was intrinsically linked to, and needed to
be integrated by, his activities and sensitivities as director
and theatre man, and that the greater part of his theatre
could live aesthetically only if presented on the stage by
Pirandello himself. Gramsci's point becomes clear if we
recall Reinhardt's staging of Sei personaggi or a recent
production of this play at Vienna's Burg theatre where the
character of Madama Pace was cut entirely. Yet she is
38
precisely a key figure in that her appearance is explicable
only in terms of Pirandellian concepts of art and
theatricality. Thus Gramsci evidently refers to
characteristics that indeed may not be gleaned from stage
directions alone. Pirandello in fact, did not develop any
special theories of staging, nor is there anything spectacular
in his requirement that directors be faithful to the text and
actors in the Stanislavskijan manner identify completely
with the characters
In the application of one or other theatrical device, of
course, Pirandello was not alone. From Claudel to Cocteau,
from O'Neill to Wilder, from Shaw to Priestley, and from
the German Expressionist drama to that of the Russians,
reaction against the fourth wall convention was common.
Pirandello's importance lies in the fact that he
uncompromisingly used these devices to fathom, test, and
question the validity of an art form. Architectural
endeavours moved in a parallel direction to facilitate the
theatrical concerns of the playwrights. Yet even if we regard
all innovations in stage design—from Gropius's project of a
Totaltheater for Piscator in 1927, to the encircling stage of
Baylor University in the United States—as a reaction
against a loss of contact with this very scéne encadrée, the
question arises whether the cause of such a loss of contact
does not lie too deep to be remedied by a mere change in
the outer form of theatre. We should not be misled by the
ardent advocates of such forms, especially the arena-type
theatre. Some of their assertions concerning “historically
sanctioned evidence” of the authenticity of these forms in
the early course of theatre are all but convincing. Moreover,
the aesthetic effect of theatre-in-the-round, for example, is
in no way affected by the rather controversial question of its
use, or the use of a similar form, historically. The fact is, the
evolution of theatre went the way it did; therefore, if such a
form as theatre-in-the-round is genuine, it will have to stand
or fall on its own merits. Georg Lukacs in an article on the
sociology of modern drama arrived indeed at quite different
conclusions, namely that, for reasons of intellectual-artistic
exclusivity, modern drama had lost its broad appeal to mass
audiences, and that such reasons had brought forth the
intimate theatre.
Yet, does a remedy here not lie first and foremost in
the very vehicle of theatre, its repertoire? Do not the
playwrights, rather than the architects, have the primary
responsibility here? For theatre derives its tension (and thus
contact) through the representation of its themes in eternal
conflict with the world as it is. It is rather in this respect that
we see the possibility of achieving contact, and not in the
mere technical solution of fencing in the audience like a
herd of intellectual sheep. For it is from this reaction that
theatre derives its essence and lifeblood, and were we ever
to succeed, as the philosopher Reinhold Schneider observed
at a recent congress on theatre, in transforming human
existence into a solved equation, then the drama would be
dead.
Thus, the major aspects and peculiarities of modern
drama, as we pointed them out in the specific case of
Pirandello, evidently have deeper roots. It would be skirting
the issue, we believe, to view the playwright's denunciation
of intentional finality (the very mark of his art) and causality
as nothing more than a reaction against naturalistic drama.
The same goes for the continuous dédoublemeut of dramatic
action, the breaking of dramatic illusion. Both
dédoublement of the action and denunciation of intentional
finality and causality may be the sign of a crisis in the
artist's conscience, whether made objectively clear or not,
just as in the novel the disappearance of a psychologically
differentiated narrator points in the same direction. In this
respect, Thomas Mann in Die Entstebung des Dr. Faustus
raised the basic question whether the play of art was still
allowed, given the present state of our consciousness, our
perception, our knowledge, and our sense of truth; whether
it was still spiritually possible and could be taken seriously;
whether the work of art as such, closed in itself, selfsufficient and harmonious, had any legitimate relation to the
complete uncertainty, the problematical nature and the
chaos of our social situation. In short, whether all
appearance, even the most beautiful one and especially the
most beautiful one, had not become a lie in our day.
Translated into terms of the theatre, this raises the
question of whether the playwright still feels entitled to use
his art for the specific purposes and concerns he chooses to
think of as important for this time. At the congress on
theatre held in Darmstadt in 1955, Friedrich Durrenmatt
brought up the issue of whether the world of today could
still be represented by the theatre. Brecht, in a brief message
sent from Berlin, replied in the affirmative: the world could
still be represented on the stage, but only if it were
conceived as veranderbar, as changeable. In Brecht's
statement, theatre, besides having been seen as a revolt
against life, was also thought of as changing the world in a
particular sense. As to the nature of this particular sense,
there could be littie doubt, since the connection was quite
evident with the Marxist idea that the philosophers have
only interpreted the world, but that the task is to change it.
Another sentence of the same message, however, touched
the central issue. There, Brecht concluded that in an age
whose science knew how to alter nature to such a degree
that the world appeared almost inhabitable, man could not
for much longer be described to man as a victim, as an
object in an unknown, yet fixed and immutable world, since
“from the position of a playing ball, the laws of motion may
hardly be conceived”.
Brecht puts his finger on the central issue, and also
clearly states the dilemma: does the artist, the playwright,
still have the right to, and can he, represent this world of
ours while being part of it? We do not want to drive home
the obvious; yes, he can. Moliere was part of his own world,
so were Shakespeare, Goldoni, and Schiller. The question
lies apparently with the artist's conscience. May not the
peculiar way in which he chooses to represent this world he
lives in be a consequence of the knowledge (made
objectively clear or not) that he too is a Spielball a playing
ball? Does the playwright, who refuses to allow his dramatic
world anything more than provisional status (as Pirandello
refuses to give the story of the Six Characters), not also
39
confess that he as a fixum is gone as well? And in so doing
he consequently interrupts the show of his as “world” in
order to question his own representation, to show his
awareness of the very questionability of his art while still
using it as a medium. Thus the dédoublement of the action,
the destruction of illusion, of aesthetic distance, does not
appear to be merely a gimmick in the sense of the épater le
bourgeois of yore, but seems to have a deeper reason and
meaning: that of a sinc érité truquée.
Also, the denunciation of intentional finality and
causality (the sending of Mademoiselle to the horse races so
she may meet Monsieur), is really a specious issue. Life is
not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, as
Virginia Woolf put it, and the artist well knows that it is not
enough to imitate man in order to represent him. Schelling
already recognized the problem when he inquired into the
significance of empirical and absolute necessity. Lukacs, in
a discussion of causality, chance, and necessity in his recent
Aesthetics, clearly points out that it is not the task of the
artist to “play down” causal connections or even abolish
them because it is precisely through them that the
character's substance is put in relief; thus, in a deeper sense,
life is not being “falsified”, but is given its true essence. It is
for these reasons that Tolstoi's Andrej Bolkonskij and
Anatol Kuragin, his rival, meet in the same operating room,
and it is, as Lukacs says, precisely a sign of great writers
that they handle such cases with sovereign nonchalance.
The sometimes painful emphasis upon theatricality
may thus be invoked in defence of the playwright who does
not want to be suspected of believing his own make-believe.
This concern was expressed directly by F. A. Winds, a
German theatre manager, in a discussion with Brecht.
There, Winds called attention to the de-emphasizing of the
as if-character of theatre in Brecht's work as being
important for modern theatre since it rescued it for the
audience. In Fielding's Tom Jones, Partridge cries out:
“Well, well, I know it is only a play: and besides, if there
was anything in all this, Madam Miller would not laugh so.”
Yet it is precisely this issue that seems to worry the modern
playwright, for a mere destruction of illusion alone does not
require such heavy guns; nowadays the Partridges are few
and far between. The phenomenon of dédoublement of
action, of destruction of aesthetic distance, may be the
expression of an awareness on the existential level, of the
questionability of a specific art form that is the legacy of
times with an outlook and relation to the world very
different from our own. There may be additional reasons for
this change in approach as there are with any complex
phenomenon — but this one seems to us to be of central
concern.
The playwright himself assumes that his audience will
no longer accept theatre as theatre, that it is too aware of the
theatre as being a “swindle”, not real. Therefore, the
playwright, too, wishes to make known his awareness of the
unrealness of theatre by analytically dissecting it, by playing
with it, or making fun of it; and it is indicative that in a great
many such plays this aesthetic problem occupies a central
position: theatre-within-the-theatre. Such direct concern has
been expressed by Curel, Lenormand, and Pirandello in
plays which have this issue as their very theme; of the
younger generation, Anouilh has said repeatedly in
interviews that he, with his masters and colleagues from
Giraudoux to Achard to Salacrou, has been fighting since
the First World War to strangle plots and kill the notion of
the “well-made” play which Pirandello had attempted to
asphyxiate with his Sei personaggi. But by this analytical
approach, by this making fun, by establishing a sort of
rapport between himself and the audience rather than
between his art and the audience, the playwright possibly
still hopes to reinforce the truth of his story. Perhaps there
is an effort on the part of the playwright to reaffirm again
the truth of art to life by making fun of art as art.
Pirandello has toppled as he said he would—the white
columns erected by the Greeks over the dark abyss. The
view is no longer obstructed. The spectator has indeed been
“liberated” from any fixed viewpoint, yet his freedom has
proved to be more of a Greek gift than one by which he
would be enabled to perceive new values; new values which
will always have to be conveyed in terms of art. The basic
relativity, heterogeneousness, and insecurity of these times
should thus certainly be represented, but within the form of
art and not as principle of that form of art. As a result of
works such as Pirandello's, the new drama perhaps will one
day realize the portentous significance of what one of its
ardent advocates, Brecht, once said, namely that the
dynamics of representation should not be mistaken for the
dynamics of the very matter to be represented.
Giovanni Gentile. (1966). “Pirandello and Modern Drama”.
Pirandello Studies in Modern European Literature and
Thought. New York: Hillary House Inc.
40
influence on the plays' pessimistic philosophy even if this
philosophy is based on the author's nature.
Maschere Nude (1918-21), the title he gave to his
collection of plays, is difficult to translate because of its
complexity. Literally this expression means “naked masks”,
but “masks” usually indicates a bare surface. In this case,
however, the word is applied to the disguise which hides
one from others and from one's self and which signifies to
Pirandello the form of the self surface with an unfathomable
being behind it. “Veiled” masks, analyzed and dissolved
with penetrating clarity: this is the portrayal of human
beings in his dramas—men are unmasked. That is the
meaning of the phrase.
The most remarkable feature of Pirandello's art is his
almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into
good theatre. Usually the theatre requires human
stereotypes; here the spirit is like a shadow, obscurity
behind obscurity, and one cannot decide what is more or
less central inside. Finally one racks his brains, for there is
no centre. Everything is relative, nothing can be grasped
completely, and yet the plays can sometimes seize,
captivate, and charm even the great international public.
This result is wholly paradoxical. As the author himself
explained, it depends on the fact that his works “arise out of
images taken from life which have passed through a filter of
ideas and which hold me completely captive”. It is the
image which is fundamental, not, as many have believed,
the abstract idea disguised afterwards by an image.
It has been said that Pirandello has but a “single”, idea,
the illusory nature of the personality, of the «I». The charge
is easy to prove. The author is indeed obsessed with that
idea. However, even if the idea is expanded to include the
relativity of everything man believes he sees and
understands, this charge is unfair.
Pirandello's dramatic art did not at first break with
general literary tendencies. He treated social and ethical
problems, the conflict between parenthood and the social
structure with its inflexible notions of honour and decency,
and the difficulties that human goodness finds in protecting
itself against the same adversaries. All this was presented in
morally as well as logically complicated situations and
ended either in victory or defeat. These problems had their
natural counterpart in the analysis of the “I” of the
characters who were as relative as the idea against which
they were fighting.
In several of his plays it is the idea others have of a
personality and the effect they experience from it which
becomes the principal subject. Others know us only as we
know them, imperfectly; and yet we make definitive
judgments. It is under the atmospheric pressure of these
judgments that the consciousness of one's self can be
changed. In Tutto per bene (1920) [All For The Best] this
psychological process is carried to its conclusion. In Vestire
gli ignudi (1923) [To Clothe the Naked] the motif is turned
upside down and assumes a moving tragic character. A lost
life, an “I”, no longer finding anything in itself, desires
death but, turning entirely to the outside, has a last pathetic
wish to have a proper shroud in the beautifying idea which
Presentation Speech
By Per Hallström, Permanent Secretary
of the Swedish Academy, on
December 10, 1934
The work of Luigi Pirandello is extensive. As an
author of novellas he certainly is without equal in output,
even in the primary country of this literary genre.
Boccaccio's Decameron contains one hundred novellas;
Pirandello's Novelle per un anno (1922-37) has one for each
day of the year. They offer much variation in subject matter
as well as in character: descriptions of life either purely
realistic or philosophically profound or paradoxical, as
often marked by humour as by satire. There are also
creations of a jaunty poetic imagination in which the
demands of reality give way to an ideal and creative truth.
The common feature of all these novellas is the
effortless improvisation that gives them spontaneity, élan,
and life. But since the limited scope of the novella demands
a particularly strict composition, we also find the result of
improvisation. In his hurried treatment of the subject
Pirandello may soon lose control, without any concern for
the overall impression. Although his novellas reveal much
originality, they are hardly representative of the
accomplished master; this is readily apparent when one
notes the many motifs which were later employed in his
dramatic work.
Nor do his novels mark the zenith of his literary
achievement. Although his early novels were imbued with
the same ideas with which he made his profoundly original
contribution to the modern theatre, he reserved the
definitive shaping of these ideas for the theatre.
In the short survey that is possible here, we can
mention only one of these novels in which a distinctive
feature of his concept of our times, his disgust and fear of
materialism which mechanizes life, appears most strongly.
The novel is Si gira (1916) [Shoot!], titled after a technical
term of the cinema, “Shoot one”. The expression warns the
actors when the shooting of a scene begins. The narrator is
the one who «shoots», that is, the cameraman of a large film
industry. He finds a special meaning in his work. For him,
life with all its good and evil is reduced to the material of
images mechanically produced for a thoughtless pastime; it
has no other purpose. The photographic apparatus becomes
a demon which swallows everything and unrolls it on the
film reel, thus giving it an outward appearance of reality, an
appearance which is, in essence, spiritual death and
emptiness. Our modern existence revolves and runs with the
same lifeless speed, completely mechanized as if it were
destroyed and annihilated. The author's attitude is expressed
with extreme intensity. The mere plot is devastating enough.
That is the background of Pirandello's dramas, limited
as they most often are to purely psychological problems.
The bitterness of our present era must have had much
41
others have of its former being. In this gripping play even
Iying appears by its anguish as a kind of innocence.
But the author does not stop here; several of his plays
deal with the lie in the world of relativity and examine with
a penetrating logic how more or less criminal this lie is. In
La vita che ti diedi (1924) [The Life I Gave You] the right to
unreality receives beautiful and great expression. A woman,
having lost her only son, no longer has anything which
holds her to life; yet the very violence of the blow
reawakens in her a strength which dispels death, as light
dispels darkness. All has become shadows; she feels that not
only herself but all existence is “such stuff as dreams are
made of”. In her heart she guards both the memory and the
dream, and now they are able to surpass all other things.
The son to whom she gave life, who always filled her soul,
fills it still. There no void is possible; the son cannot be
removed. He remains in her presence, a form she cannot
grasp; she feels him there as much as she is able to feel
anything. Thus the relativity of truth has taken the shape of
a simple and sublime mystery.
The same relativity appears as an enigma in Così é (se
vipare) (1918) [Right You Are (If You Think You Are)]. The
play is called a parable, which means that its singular story
makes no pretensions to reality. It is a bold and ingenious
fabrication which imparts wisdom. The circumstances of a
family, recently settled in a provincial city, become
intolerable to the other inhabitants of the town. Of the three
members of the family, the husband, the wife, and the
mother-in-law, either the husband or the mother-in-law,
each otherwise reasonable, must be viewed as seized with
absurd ideas about the identity of the wife. The last speaker
always has the final say on the issue, but a comparison of
the conflicting statements leaves it in doubt. The
questionings and the confrontation of the two characters are
described with great dramatic art and with a knowledge of
the most subtle maladies of the soul. The wife should be
able to resolve the puzzle, but when she appears she is
veiled like the goddess of knowledge and speaks
mysteriously; to each of the interested parties she represents
what she must be in order for that person to preserve his
image of her. In reality she is the symbol of the truth which
no one can grasp in its entirety.
The play is also a brilliant satire on man's curiosity and
false wisdom; in it Pirandello presents a catalogue of types
and reveals a penetrating self-conceit, either partially or
completely ridiculous, in those attempting to discover truth.
The whole remains a masterpiece in its own right.
The central problem in the author's dramatic work,
however, is the analysis of the “I”—its dissolution in
contrary elements, the negation of its unity as illusory, and
the symbolical description of the Maschere nude. Thanks to
the inexhaustible productivity of his mind, Pirandello
attacks the problem from different sides, some of which
have already been mentioned.
By sounding the depths of madness, he makes
important discoveries. In the tragedy of Enrico IV (1922)
[Henry IV], for example, the strongest impression comes
from the struggle of the personality for its identity in the
eternally flowing torrent of time. In Il giuoco delle parti
(19191) [The Rules of the Game] Pirandello creates a drama
of pure abstractions: he uses the artificial notions of duty to
which members of society can be subjected by the force of
tradition with resolute logic for an action completely
contrary to expectation. As by a stroke of a magic wand, the
game of abstractions fills the scene ith an extremely
captivating life.
Sei Personaggi in cerca d'autore (1921) [Six
Characters in Search of an Author] is a game similar to that
described earlier and at the same time its very opposite; it is
both profoundly serious and full of ideas. Here unrestrained
creative imagination rather than abstraction dominates. It is
the true drama of poetic creation; it is also the settling of
accounts between the theatre and truth, between appearance
and reality. Moreover, it is the half-despairing message of
art to the soul of a ravaged age, of fragmentary scenes both
fulminating and explosive. This flood of violent feeling and
superior intellectuality, rich in poetry, is truly the inspiration
of genius. The world-wide success of the play, which proves
that it has to some extent been understood, is as
extraordinary as the piece itself There is neither the
necessity nor the time to recall its magically startling details.
The skeptical psychology on which Pirandello has
based his remarkable production is purely negative. If it
were adopted by the general public with the same naiveté
with which new and bold ideas are generally received, it
would indeed entail more than one risk. But there is no
danger that this will happen. It applies itself to purely
intellectual realms and the general public scarcely follows it
there. If by chance someone might be persuaded that his “I”
is a fiction, he would soon be convinced that in practice this
“I” does possess a certain degree of reality. Just as it is
impossible to prove the freedom of the will, which is
however constantly proved by experience, so the “I”
manifestly finds means to make itself remembered. These
means are gross or subtle. The most subtle of them perhaps
consists in the faculty of thought itself; among others, the
thought which wants to annihilate the “I”.
But the analytical work of this great writer retains its
value, especially if compared to several other things to
which we have been treated in our time. Psychological
analysis has given us complexes, which have spread
immense pleasure and joy. They have even been
worshipped as fetishes by apparently pious minds.
Barbarous fetishes! To a person with some visual
imagination, they resemble seaweed entangled in the water.
Small fish often hover before this seaweed meditating until,
their heads clear at last, they sink into it and disappear.
Pirandello's skepticism protects us from such adventures;
furthermore, he can help us. He warns us not to touch the
delicate tissue of the human soul in a coarsely dogmatic and
blind manner.
As a moralist, Pirandello is neither paradoxical nor
destructive. Good remains good, and evil, evil. A nobly oldfashioned humanity dominates his ideas about the world of
men. His bitter pessimism has not stifled his idealism; his
penetrating analytical reason has not cut the roots of life.
42
Happiness does not occupy a large place in the world of his
imagination, but what gives dignity to life still finds enough
air to breathe in it.
Dear Dr. Pirandello—Mine was the difficult task of
presenting a concise synopsis of your profound literary
work. Although such a brief sketch is hardly adequate, I
have carried out my charge with pleasure.
May I now ask you to receive from His Majesty the
Nobel Prize in Literature, of which the Swedish Academy
has deemed you worthy.
Per Hallström. (1969). “Presentation Speech”. Nobel
Lectures, Literature 1901-1967. Horst Frenz, ed. Elsevier
Publishing Company, Amsterdam.
43
Bonn where he was admitted to the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in 1891. His doctoral thesis was on The
Phonetic Development of the Agrigento Dialect, and almost
immediately after completing his studies in Bonn he moved
to Rome intent on pursuing a career as a writer.
In 1894 he married Maria Antonietta Portulano, who
was also from Agrigento; this was arranged by the two
families and seems to have been successful until 1903 when
his father was suddenly made bankrupt. The sulphur mines
had been flooded and Stefano had made some unwise
speculations: Antonietta’s dowry was invested in the same
mines so that the young Pirandello family, living in Rome,
were without the regular allowance from Stefano or the
income from the dowry investment. By now they had three
children and Pirandello had already been teaching for some
time: he had to find a way of producing even more for his
family, so he began teaching private pupils as well as
fulfilling his full-time lectureship. Unhappily, the family
financial disaster unbalanced Antonietta and she became
unreasonably jealous of both Pirandello’s work and his
pupils at the Istituto Superiore di Magisterio Femminile.
From this time on the marriage became a tormented
relationship. The figure of the suffering and jealous wife
often occurs in his work: sometimes she appears as nothing
more than a destructive oppression, driving the husband to
anger as in The Man with the Flower in His Mouth.
Introduction
By John Linstrum
The progress of arts and sciences is punctuated by
important publications, discoveries and performances after
which nothing can ever be the same. In 1921 the first
production of Six Characters in Search of an Author caused
a riot in Rome at the Teatro Valle, with Pirandello and his
daughter forced to run the gauntlet of a crowd shouting wild
abuse at the stage door after the performance. In 1923
Pitoëff’s production in Paris caused another sensation,
although milder and confined at first to the smaller circle of
theatrical and literary enthusiasts: however, the tone was
generally approving and appreciative. From that moment
on, Pirandello’s reputation and success grew steadily.
I am the Son of Chaos
Pirandello was born in Sicily in 1867 in a district
called Cavusu (Chaos) close to Girgenti, now known as
Agrigento. The house was on the coast looking towards
North Africa and has become the Centre for Pirandello
Studies: the rooms on the first floor are set out as a small
museum of publications and photographs, documents and
paintings, memorabilia of public and private life. The
house, gardens and the path down to the pine tree on the
cliff are well-cared for and quite unlike the earliest
photographs which show the building as rather exposed and
neglected. Behind the house on the slopes of the hill three
or four miles away rise the buildings of modern Agrigento
lifting themselves cleanly out of the lower and older parts of
the city. It was not so a hundred years ago when it was
described as a “mass of huts and hovels” whose streets
“were infected by evil smells”. Garibaldi’s revolution had
been only seven years before, when Stefano Pirandello,
Luigi’s father, had fought in the streets of Palermo. Stefano
was big and arrogant and in 1867, the year of Luigi’s birth,
he fought again, this time in the streets of Girgenti, against a
Mafioso who was trying to extort protection money. Stefano
was wounded badly but survived: his opponent was, rather
surprisingly, gaoled for seven years. Stefano Pirandello was
the manager and owner of one of the sulphur mines at Porto
Empedocle, and Luigi Pirandello, who worked there for a
short time, witnessed in his youth lives and conditions of
such industrial slavery as Zola wrote about in Germinal.
This was his Sicilian background and inheritance: an
island of astonishing natural beauty and human degradation,
inhabited by people of passion with a highly developed
sense of formality. The social mores were extreme in their
rigidity: hypocrisy, repression and exploitation all went
hand in hand with a powerful church regime, a strict
morality and a feudal society.
Pirandello was fortunate to escape from this
atmosphere, to go to the Universities of Palermo, Rome and
She watches me from a distance. And believe me,
I’d like to go over there and kick her but it
wouldn’t be any use. She’s like one of those stray
dogs, obstinate. The more you kick them the
closer they stick to you. And you can’t imagine
what that woman is suffering on my account...she
makes me so angry you wouldn’t believe it.
Sometimes I jump out at her from behind to
frighten her off. . . Sometimes, you know, a
savage desire to strangle her comes into my
fingers. But nothing ever happens.
At other times it is invested with a great sympathy, yet a
sympathy tinged with exasperation. Soon after his wife was
removed to a mental home in 1919 he wrote in Six
Characters:
I couldn’t bear the sight of this woman near me.
Not so much because of the annoyance she
caused me, you see, or even the feeling of being
stifled, being suffocated that I got from her, as
for the sorrow, the painful sorrow that I felt for
her...After she’d gone away my house seemed
empty. She’d been like a weight on my spirit but
she filled the house with her presence. Alone in
the house I wandered around like a lost soul.’
Antonietta’s derangement had shown itself in spasms, and
this continuous uncertainty about her state of mind must
have caused far more tension in the family than if she had
been constantly needing care. She was convinced that her
44
husband was unfaithful, and she created her own image that
was far from the reality. Pirandello was condemned to live
with the constant picture of this other man presented to
himself, yet he and his family remained close and devoted.
The years between 1914 and 1918 were terrible for them
all: Pirandello was oppressed by his wife’s illness, one son
was a prisoner of war in Austria, the other was ill in the
Italian army and his daughter, Lietta, was the constant
object of his wife’s vicious accusations. Pirandello himself
was having to teach to earn money and had little enough
time to write or do more than survive the pressures of
family and financial worries.
Immediately after Six Characters was performed in
1921 he began writing his next play, Henry IV. The keynote
of the play is the counterpointing of sanity and madness and
how the appearance of mental disturbance alters people’s
behaviour and perception. During the same period of
personal distress, 1918-1919 he wrote The Rules of the
Game, in which we find Leone Gala and his wife Silia
separated: their only contact is a formal visiting procedure,
reminiscent of the courting ritual of Pirandello’s own early
meetings with Antonietta.
Eventually in 1919 Antonietta was committed to the
mental home in which she remained until her death in 1959.
At first Pirandello seemed to live in the hope that she would
return to him at some time, restored and happy, but finally
in 1924 he seems to have given up this hope. The date
coincides with a new phase in his life, one of travel and
living with few possessions, mostly in hotels and temporary
apartments.
Basle, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Berlin, Prague, Vienna,
Budapest as well as in Argentina and Brazil, but by 1928
the company was heavily in debt, despite Government
subsidies, and was dissolved.
Pirandello was attempting to blend the compelling
improvisational skill of the best Italian performers with the
thoroughness of the new Russian approach that Stanislavsky
had evolved for the Moscow Art Theatre and which was
being followed by other European directors. Their
programme included plays other than those by Pirandello,
but like other great theatrical figures, Stanislavsky and
Brecht, for instance, his intent was to urge his performers to
the limits of their art, to demand of them a commitment and
dedication that would make them exceptional interpreters of
the plays they were presenting.
When I direct, the actors must study their parts
and learn them by heart. They must study
carefully, at home, on their own, in silence and
meditation. And when they come on stage, they
must not be actors any longer, they must be the
characters in the play they are acting. That way
they will have a reality in their own right that is
absolute not relative: it won’t be the false truth of
the stage but the positive undeniable truth of
life.’ (Niccodemi quoted in Basnett-Maguire)
The Italian theatre that Pirandello’s audience was
accustomed to was not commonly so dedicated and
professional in its approach, not so concerned with truth as
this. It was a theatre where rehearsals were casual and the
ultimate success of a performance would depend on
individual brilliance and not on a general high standard.
Performers like Duse and Salvini were clearly outstanding
but their own special talents were idiosyncratic and not
suitable within Pirandello’s company. Although Duse was
apparently very interested in The Life I Gave You and it was
agreed that she should perform in it, she never did.
He recruited one very promising performer from
Milan, Marta Abba, and she became his leading actress and
his close companion. In his own strange way Pirandello
seems to have been in love with her, almost to the end of his
life. Ruggero Ruggeri, who performed Henry IV at its first
performances and who was close to Pirandello for many
years as a fellow artist and as a friend, refers to Pirandello’s
own illuminative powers as a performer. He said that if he
were ever uncertain what sort of expression to use during a
rehearsal he only had to look at Pirandello and copy his
face. Dario Niccodemi tells us that when Pirandello was
reading a script to the company:
Pirandello and the Actors
It was not until he was in his middle forties that
Pirandello began seriously writing for the theatre. There had
been a frustrating period during the 1880s when he wrote
several plays which are now known only by their titles, but
from 1916 until his death in 1936 he wrote around forty
plays. He had made a dramatic adaptation of two of his
short stories in 1911, but in 1917 he began a remarkable
surge of creative energy with six plays before The Rules of
the Game in 1919, five more before Six Characters in
Search of an Author in 1921 and with Henry IV following
immediately after that. Between 1922 and his death in 1936
he wrote another twenty-six plays, although none enjoyed
the international success of Six Characters and Henry IV.
Once this outburst of drama had begun, he rarely
returned to the novel or the short story and seemed to
neglect verse altogether. It is not surprising that the drama
absorbed all his energies, because in 1924 he helped to form
and then soon began to direct a theatrical company called
The Arts Theatre of Rome; with this company he toured all
over Europe and America, directing and writing all the time.
He recruited actors who seemed to him to be especially
sympathetic to his work and methods; they formed a closeknit group. The Arts Theatre existed from 1924 until 1928.
It toured Italy, of course, and performed in London, Paris,
It was irresistible! Without ever looking up from
the script, his hands gripping the table...his eyes
glistening with a truly superhuman intoxication
his burning brow furrowed as if by lightning,
pouring with sweat, dealing violent punches on
the page as if to emphasise certain words to make
them sink into the minds of the others. He
45
seemed to be alone with the passion of his
characters, with their will dominating his own.’
(Basnett-Maguire)
And at the end of the play:
Slowly the SON comes on from the right,
followed by the MOTHER with her arms raised
towards him. Then from the left, the FATHER
enters. They come together in the middle of the
stage and stand there as if transfixed.
Such violence, such Sicilian passion are constant elements
in a dramatist whose work has often been characterised as
cerebral: but it is this intensity, this passion, this burning
energy that has always made Pirandello an exciting
challenge to actors and directors, not only to those of his
own time, like Ruggeri, but to actors ever since. The things
that concern Pirandello are also the essential materials of
the actor’s craft: role-play, the fragmentation of character,
the uncertainty about the frontiers of truth and make-believe
and where Life and Art separate. Actors and directors
appreciate him as a writer dealing with the ideas they know
about from their own experience in the exercise of their
skills, and their own imaginative patterns are in sympathy
with those of Pirandello—that is, if they are performers who
enjoy the stimulating intellectual challenge that Pirandello
holds out to them. He needs actors capable of the intensity
and energy that he demonstrated himself and directors who
can lead us with a similar energy and delight as the
arguments and the drama twist and turn.
In Henry IV the physical presentation of Henry recalls the
Sicilian puppets. On his first entrance the stage directions
read:
He is close to fifty, extremely pale, and already
grey at the back of his head, though at the
temples and forehead he seems fair, the result of
an almost childishly obvious use of dye. He
wears equally very obvious doll-like make-up on
his cheekbones, over his tragic pallor...His eyes
are fixed in a frightening ago nised stare.
On stage there are two life-size portraits, and in Act III
Fridat and Di Nolli are dressed as the figures in the portraits
and stand there in the place of the painting:
In the gloom the rear wall can only just be made
out. The canvasses with the two portraits have
been removed, and in their place, within the
frames which remain surrounding the hollows of
the niches, placed in the exact poses of the
portraits, are FRIDA, dressed as the
‘Marchioness of Tuscany’, as in Act Two and
CARLO Dl NOLLI as ‘Henry IV’.
Puppets
The dramatic background of commedia dell’arte
combined with Sicilian puppets could hardly have been a
better foundation for Pirandello’s creation of dramatic
paradoxes. The puppet’s face is unchanging no matter what
the story demands: there is a feeling of the contrary in the
visual presentation. The commedia dell’arte often
demanded mercurial changes of attitude, apparent
contradictions: the traditional scenarii contain tears and
laughter together. They also contain masked and unmasked
faces. If we refer to specific points in the three plays in this
volume we shall find in Six Characters a description of The
Characters’ first appearance.
And a few lines later:
She sticks her head out of the niche a little and
looks towards the other niche, though still trying
to keep up the role she’s been allotted.
In The Rules of the Game we do not find puppets or masks,
although Leone’s face is one of the best masks of all,
betraying nothing of his feelings: but there is a twist of the
plot worthy of a commedia device with its sudden
contradiction, a twist that is both an intellectual somersault
and a commedia lazzo. Leone Gala is wakened early to fight
a duel in defence of his wife’s honour. Guido Venanzi is his
wife’s lover and also his second in the duel.
The CHARACTERS should not appear as
ghosts, but as created realities, timeless
creations of the imagination, and so more real
and consistent than the changeable realities of
the ACTORS. The masks are designed to give
the impression of figures constructed by art,
each one fixed forever in its own fundamental
emotion; that is, Remorse for the FATHER,
Revenge for the STEPDAUGHTER, Scorn for
the SON, Sorrow for the MOTHER. Her mask
should have wax tears in the corners of the eyes
and down the cheeks like the sculptured or
painted weeping Madonnas in a church. Her
dress should be of a plain material, in stiff folds,
looking almost as if it were carved and not of an
ordinary material you can buy in a shop and
have made up by a dressmaker.
GUIDO. You have to fight.
LEONE. I have to fight, too, have I?
BARELLI. ‘Too’? What do you mean?
LEONE. Oh, no, my friends. You’re mistaken!
GUIDO. Do you want to withdraw?
BARELLI. Don’t you want to fight, now?
LEONE. I? Withdraw? But you know perfectly
well that I always firmly maintain my
position...You and my wife upset my whole day
46
yesterday, Venanzi, trying to make me do what I
admitted all the time was my duty.
GUIDO. But.. .but...
BARELLI. You’re going to fight!
LEONE. That’s not my duty.
BARELLI. Whose is it then?
LEONE (pointing to GUIDO). His.
BARELLI. Guido’s?
LEONE. Yes, his.
the best expression of a group of writers writing for what is
known as the teatro del grottesco and is a clear prelude to
Pirandello’s mature work. It has the paradoxes, the
theatrical antitheses that Pirandello himself used so
skilfully: for instance, at one moment in The Mask and the
Face a character quietly and secretly watches from a
window as her own funeral procession goes past.
A title like teatro del gi-ottesco can rarely be more
than a convenient label: it can even be misleading. But the
tone is accurately expressed in the word “grotesque”.
Pirandello’s own wry, ironic sense of the “contrariness” of
things and events is the grotteschi dramatists’ view
stretched to a greater length: it includes the notion of
comedy and tragedy co-existing, vision and reality melting
into each other, the reflection in the mirror being confused
with the original thing itself, the mask and the face
sometimes being indistinguishable.
The theatre in Italy between 1900 and 1914 is well
described by Chiarelli:
By a clever side-stepping movement, Leone has left Guido
responsible as his second, for upholding the honour of Silia,
the wife of Leone and subject of the duel. It was Guido and
Silia who planned the duel so that Leone would be removed
from their path: now it is Guido who falls into his own trap,
a truly commedia dell’arte device of substitution.
Pirandello’s Fellow Writers
The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth was the time for Pirandello’s ideas to
crystallize and we must look for the background to this in
the shaking of traditional fundamental religious beliefs
begun by Darwin, the attempts to describe the springs of
human mental activity by Freud, the Nietzschean
description of man’s role, the imaginative realism of Ibsen,
the tortured creatures of Strindberg, the realism of Zola, the
poetic countercharge of the fin de siècle to realism.
Pirandello’s academic background in the eighties and his
café society literary circles of the nineties in Rome made
him very familiar with the intellectual and artistic
development of Europe. One must add to that, however, the
peculiar strength of his Sicilian background. Giovanni
Verga and Luigi Capuana, both Sicilians, had renamed the
European realism movement and now called it verism or
verismo, and in this linguistic distinction lay an awareness
of the separation they identified not only between Sicily and
Europe but between Sicily and Italy. The dialect that
Pirandello studied for his doctorate was of prime
importance for Sicilians, and Nino Martaglio had even set
up a repertory company in 1903 to perform plays in
Sicilian. Several of Pirandello’s own plays were first written
in Sicilian and not standard Italian.
But despite his Sicilian roots Pirandello lived mostly
in Rome and there the poetic counter-revolution to Realism
or Verism was best seen in Gabriele D’Annunzio, the
romantic leader whose verse plays were successful with the
opera-loving Italian audience and at the same time
anathema to Pirandello and his literary friends. D’Annunzio,
with his extravagant romanticism, seemed to Pirandello to
be “extraordinarily ridiculous”.
More to Pirandello’s taste was Rosso di san Secondo,
another Sicilian, whose play, Marionettes, What Passion!
was written in 1918 just before The Rules of the Game.
However, the most notable play of this period before
Pirandello’s success was Luigi Chiarelli’s The Mask and the
Face, written in 1913 but not performed until 1916. This is
Italian theatre slumbered. It was impossible to go
to the theatre without meeting languid loquacious
grand-daughters of Marguerite Gautier or some
tardy follower of Oswald or Cyrano. The public
dropped sentimental tears and left the playhouse
weighed down in spirit. (Giudice)
The vigour of Chiarelli’s own work, of Rosso di San
Secondo’s, of Pirandello’s in 1917, 1918 and 1919—Liola,
Cap and Bells, Right You Are (If You Think So) and The
Rules of the Game in particular—was an antidote to the fagend of romanticism and the pale imitation of French drama.
But it was not until the 1921 performance in Rome of Six
Characters caused an uproar that Pirandello began to
assume his true role as a dramatic force in Europe. Even
then it needed the Pitoéff production in Paris in 1923 and
the tours of the Arts Theatre between 1924 and 1928 to
consolidate not merely a success but a dramatic revolution.
No single writer can be seen as the sole begetter of a
revolution: Pirandello was not alone. He was preceded and
accompanied by others, many of whom have already been
mentioned here. But it is in his work that the most
remarkable dramatic changes are seen: it is in his plays that
idea and dramatic action make the most perfect liaison.
The Feeling of the Opposite
There is a paragraph in the essay on “Humour” that
Pirandello wrote in 1908 that is frequently quoted because it
describes succinctly what would otherwise take far longer.
I see an old woman with her hair dyed and greasy
with oil: she is made up garishly and is dressed
like a young girl. I begin to laugh. I perceive that
she is the exact opposite of what a respectable
old lady should be...The sense of the comic
consists of this perception of the opposite. But if,
47
at this point, I reflect and consider that she may
not enjoy dressing up like an exotic parrot, that
she is distressed by it and does it only because
she deceives herself, pitifully, into believing that
she can retain the love of her younger husband by
making herself up like this ...then I can no longer
laugh at her . from the initial perception of the
opposite, reflection has led me to a feeling of the
opposite. This is the difference between the
comic and humour.
exclusively intellectual discussion if it were not for the
affective note, the passion that is always there. There is an
energy, an urgency that creates dramatic tension, forcing us
to attend. The style of language, often fragmented, demands
that we listen.
The plays are restless, they disturb, they erupt into
violence. If there is not an obvious restlessness and
potential violence, as there constantly is in the characters of
King Henry and The Stepdaughter, then there is a
simmering and seething, as in Leone Gala, in the eyes
behind the mask that is offered to the world. The true stamp
of Pirandello is a wry bitterness and-a cry of exasperation,
pessimism and emotional violence: at the core of his work
there is a constant agonised searching for the truth in both
character and motive, and an agony of self-doubt as the
characters strip away illusions.
And again:
We are dealing with a comic representation, but
from it we derive a feeling which either prevents
us from laughing or disturbs our laughter making
it bitter...The humorist will dismantle the
character with its different conflicting elements
and enjoy revealing the incongruities.
The Rules of the Game
This is the heart of the Pirandeilian world—the awareness
of different levels of thought and feeling in what might
superficially seem obvious. An awareness of these is not
only Pirandello’s of course: it is in Ibsen in Peer Gynt, in
Chekhov, in Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, in
O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, in Wycherley’s The
Country Wife. It is the constant basis of a great deal of
drama. What one must investigate is how it contributes to
Pirandello’s experience of the theatre and what use
Pirandello makes of it.
Suppose the egg turns out to be a bullet. The Rules of
the Game is a good title—it has a rhythm, balance and
simplicity that make it admirable. It also demonstrates one
of the problems in translation, because it is not what “Il
gioco delle parti” means. The exact translation should be
“The game of roles”: yet simple as this is, it is difficult to
translate. Other titles have been used—“The game as he
played it”, “Each in his own role”—but these are both
clumsy. However, we should remember that Leone Gala, the
central character in the play, often refers to “the game” and
its rules: the original title stressed another element which is
itself part of “the game”—that is, the roles that each of us
plays in relation to others.
Intellect into Passion
People say that my drama is obscure and they
call it cerebral drama. The new drama possesses
a character distinct from the old: whereas the
latter had as its basis passion, the former is the
expression of intellect. One of the novelties that I
have given to modern drama consists in
converting the intellect into passion.’ (Pirandello
in 1924 quoted by Starkie)
But you must play your part, just as I am playing
mine. It’s all in the game. Even Silia has grasped
that! Each of us must play his part through to the
end—In this game one wears a mask according
to the role and one obeys the rules which are
themselves created by the roles assumed.
The idea of role-playing is often used by Pirandello. In Six
Characters for instance, the Father says: “I only act, as
everyone does, the part in life that he’s chosen for himself,
or that others have chosen for him.”
The puppet theme is also related to role-playing, since
the puppet’s role is wished upon it by the puppet-master: in
the relationship of Leone, Siia and Guido, Leone is the
master and the other two the puppets. In the first scene of
the play there are many references to Leone’s domination of
Silia even when he is not there: the power he exercises over
her, even though their marriage is only a form, is too strong
for Guido Venanzi to overcome. Indeed, Venanzi himself is
eventually controlled by Leone, even to the point of death.
Dr. Spiga plays another role, that of “the doctor at the duel”
and is more concerned about what he should wear to play
the role, what costume he should adopt. Philip, the cook,
has a role that Leone thrusts upon him, that of a philosopher
Pirandello dramatised ideas: one might even say, as the
critic Robert Brustein did, that in Six Characters Pirandello
dramatised ‘the very act of creation’. He uses a whole play,
Henry IV, to express the nature of the contradiction between
appearance and reality, as well as exploring madness and
personality. In Six Characters the emphases are different
and the exploration is of personality and its complexity as
well as of appearance and reality. The obsessions of
Pirandello are easily identifiable: the human personality,
appearance and reality, the mirror as a means of selfrevelation, truth and what we think is the truth, Life and Art,
Life and Form. The development of ideas about these
themes could indeed seem cerebral: the arguments are often
tortuous, the expression sometimes equally tortuous: it
would be possible to transpose the arguments into an
48
corrupted by Bergson, and this philosophical role is
reinforced by Leone’s nicknaming him Socrates. Philip is
quite unmoved by the role he is supposed to assume: he is
more concerned about cooking and food. That is his real
role—a cook.
The play itself is more naturalistic than the later plays
about theatre or the nightmarish world of Henry IV. It has a
nearer relationship to Chiarelli’s The Mask and the Face
and is nearer to it in time. Yet Chiarelli’s is a wryly amusing
piece, not the bitter calculated play of revenge that is The
Rules of the Game. Nor does Chiarelli’s play depend so
strongly on the dramatic inheritance of commedia dell’arte.
The Rules of the Game constantly reminds us of its dramatic
origin. Leone’s face is, like himself, totally under control.
His mind is clear and precise, and his face, like a commedia
mask, never betrays his inner feelings. He is an implacable
opponent in the Renaissance tradition who enjoys “the
intellectual game that clears away all the sentimental
sediment from your mind”. At the end of the play, when he
has succeeded in arranging Venanzi’s death and when Silia
has hysterically rushed out into the garden, Leone is alone
on the stage.
no accident that Pirandello uses the image of the egg several
times in the play: the egg is for juggling, for the magician to
palm, for the clown to have dropped into his trousers or
broken over his head. It is a perfect shape, but when the
shape is destroyed by cracking, the inside will run in an
uncontrollable way, quite contrary to the impression that the
outside gave. The “mask” of the egg is plain, smooth,
logical, devoid of feeling: the “face” inside the mask is
composed of different and contrasting elements, with an
embryo of life that would be capable of feeling. If you are
Leone and clever, you can catch a thrown egg, prick the
end, and suck out the inside, play with the shell as a toy and
then crush it when you are bored. This is Venanzi’s fate and
even Siia’s. In the context of this play of masters and
servants, doctors and lovers, an egg is the ideal comic image
recalling the easily available stage properties of the
commedia and yet reminding us of a mathematical, logical
perfection.
An interpretation of this play as an elaborated
commedia scenario can only be a partial view: no commedia
was ever so shot through with the examination of thought
processes, with conversations that explore reason and
emotion, with a character’s self-examination and selfrevelation. That was not the stuff of commedia: but it is the
stuff of Pirandello.
The character of Leone is a fascinating challenge for
the actor. It is not sufficient to play his intelligent facade,
emptied of feeling: the turbulent emotions that are under the
impassive mask must break to the surface occasionally. He
must let us see, in part at least, how he is weaving a net to
trap Venanzi and Silia, a net made, moreover, of material
that they have provided. Yet we must not be shown this
planning crudely: his every speech must have an ambiguity,
an irony that will permit a glimpse of the thoughts behind
the bland exterior. The Italian audience in 1918 at the
Teatro Quirino in Rome received the play with great doubt.
Pirandello wrote to his son Stefano:
LEONE remains motionless, absorbed in deep,
serious thought. A long pause. PHILIP enters
with a breakfast tray and puts it down on the
table.
PHILIP (calling in a hollow voice). Hey!
LEONE barely turns his head. PHILIP indicates
the breakfast with a vague gesture.
Breakfast time!
LEONE, as though he has not heard, does not
move.
He has played the intellectual game to the end: Venanzi is
now dead. Leone has punished both his wife and her lover
and it appears that the honour that some might say he has
lost is of little consequence to him. “When one has emptied
oneself of every passion...”and yet, one suspects that behind
the mask there is a movement of the face. Triumph? Regret?
There must be something; there cannot be nothing. Leone
does not move, and appears not to have heard. Food no
longer attracts. A moment earlier Dr. Spiga, who played the
self-important role of the doctor earlier in the act, had
dashed into the room “pale and dishevelled in a grotesque
discomposure”: he had seized the surgical instruments in a
bundle and rushed out “without saying a word”. This
grotesque note is the key to the play: Leone’s is a grotesque
composure as opposed to Spiga’s discomposure. The
puppet-master has destroyed those puppets who rose up
against him: the cuckolded husband has destroyed his wife’s
lover, Pantaloon has destroyed Harlequin and left
Columbine distraught, while the Doctor is confused and the
insolent servant is uninvolved.
I have already referred to the lazzo of the commedia,
the device by which Leone steps to one side and the
custard-pie (or the bullet) hits the person behind, the one
who thought himself safe and free to watch unscathed. It is
The Rules of the Game was met with hostility,
owing to the incomprehension of the audience
after the first act. It picked up in the second act
and at the third it aroused considerable
discussion...The morning and evening papers
have, on the whole, been favourable to me.’
(Giudice) But the play came off very quickly.
Ruggero Ruggeri played Leone. Pirandello wrote: “Ruggero
is in love with the part and thinks The Rules of the Game
my best play.”
In Britain the play has been a little more fortunate and
favoured than we might expect—the central ideas seem
more accessible than those in Six Characters and Henry IV.
In 1953 the Third Programme broadcast a translation by
Noel Gregeen, adapted by Robert Rietty, and in 1955
Donald Pleasence appeared as Leone in Robert Rietty’s
own translation at the Arts Theatre in London. Paul Scofield
played Leone in a National Theatre production at the New
Theatre in June 1971, with Joan Plowright and Tom Baker:
49
Anthony Page directed. The translation was again by Robert
Rietty, assisted by David Hare. Scofield himself was well
received although The Times was less enthusiastic about the
rest of the cast, referring to the 1966 World Theatre Season
when an Italian company had “revealed that Pirandello was
a specialist in icily sardonic comedy with a murderously
perfect technique”.
The most recent professional performance at the time
of writing was by the late Leonard Rossiter in a production
by Anthony Quayle. It opened in Guildford and moved to
the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in London in July 1982.
Some critics were unmoved as is the general rule in Britain
for any play of Pirandello’s: others were more enthusiastic.
The play was, apparently, Rossiter’s own choice and he was
wonderfully capable of conveying the sardonic humour of
Leone, tilting the play to biting comedy at many of the more
ambiguous moments, as he played the puppet-master. For
some critics he lacked the polish of an Italian gentleman:
but his rather crumpled appearance, in comparison with the
elegence of Silia and Venanzi, could be seen as a positive
virtue—he was seemingly less concerned with outward
appearances, professing himself a man of intellect: yet it
might have been more satisfying perhaps, to have had a
Leone who could wear his clothes as well as his intellect
with more panache.
And a few lines later he described the Father as “coming
forward, followed by the others, to the foot of one of the
sets of steps”. This seems to have been an idea of
Pirandello’s, and differs from both Pitoéff in Paris in 1923
and Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1922, who had preserved
the original entrance from the back of the stage. Pirandello
was involved in the designing of the Odescalchi Theatre at
the time of establishing the Arts Theatre in 1924, and he
insisted that the stage level should be lower than the
conventional height, reducing the gap between the audience
and the actors. Having used two sets of stairs to link the
auditorium and the stage, he also used them to allow the
Producer to move into the audience space and create a
firmer dramatic statement. With this arrangement of steps
between the two essential spaces, the Characters can move
from our world, that of the audience, Life, into the world of
Art, that of the Actors: but so can the Producer. We see him
do this.
He goes down the steps into the auditorium and
stands there as if to get an idea of what the scene
will look like from the audience’s viewpoint.
We are drawn more firmly into the world of theatre. The
Producer’s objective view of the events on the stage is the
same as ours: his statements about dramatic form and
continuity are ones that a conventional audience could
accept. This identification of audience, conventional and
predictable, with the Producer, who is equally conventional,
will help immeasurably in the eventual disruption and shock
that the play is aiming at. Pirandello even supports this
notion in a snatch of conversation between the Actors.
Six Characters in Search of An Author
“A play doesn’t create people, people create a play.”
The text of Six Characters as we read it here and as it is
always performed is not the same text that Dario
Niccodemi’s company used in Rome at the Teatro Valle in
1921 nor even the script of a few months later in Milan at
the Teatro Manzoni. In 1923 Georges Pitoëff presented the
play at the Théãtre des Champs-Elysées and there were
some remarkable alterations to the original, so that in 1924
Pirandello incorporated many of Pitoëff’s changes in a new
text and added some further alterations of his own. The
differences between the texts of 1921 and 1924 are of great
interest.
From Paris Pitoëff had kept Pirandello informed about
his ideas in directing the play and these had caused some
disagreement between them. Pirandello was horrified
because Pitoéff planned to send the Characters on using a
scenic-lift at the back of the bare and open stage. He was so
concerned by this that he left Rome for Paris to remonstrate
with Pitoëff. In the event, he was convinced that it was an
excellent idea, although we find that in the later edition of
the play he did not use it again. Instead he wrote a new
entrance for the Characters.
LEADING ACTOR (to other ACTORS). Look
at this. What a show!
LEADING ACTRESS. And we’re the audience.
YOUNG ACTOR. For a change.
Not only are they the audience for this event as we all are,
sitting in the theatre, but also the audience for the
astonishing appearance of Madame Pace. She does not
come from the auditorium, however, where the Characters
came from, but from behind the proscenium arch, on the
stage itself, the Actor’s own area which is now being
invaded by these people from beyond the proscenium arch.
Of course this bridging of the gap between auditorium
and stage is not new. Beaumont and Fletcher had used it, for
instance in The Knight of the Burning Pestle as long ago as
1611 and for a not dissimilar purpose. In Pirandello,
however, the recognition of the territorial significance of
stage and auditorium is critical in recognizing the central
argument of the play about Art and Life. To support the
argument he also sub-divided the stage into areas for the
Actors and for the Characters.
The 1925 edition included the ending that Pitoëff used
in Paris. The first productions closed with the Producer
sending the Actors away, the Characters having left by the
The STAGE DOORKEEPER, in a braided cap,
has come into the auditorium, and he comes all
the way down the aisle to the stage to tell the
PRODUCER the SIX CHARACTERS have
come, who, having come in after him, look about
them a little puzzled and dismayed.
50
door at the back of the stage through which they had
entered. However, Pitoéff’s production ended as the text
now ends, with the Characters returning to the open stage
without the children, before the Stepdaughter, laughing
raucously, leaves through the auditorium. The final text
shows a very clear increase in dramatic tension, a greater
appreciation of the visual needs of drama and a more subtle
awareness of the movement patterns within the play.
This is the real drama for me; the belief that we
all, you see, think of ourselves as one single
person: but it’s not true: each of us is several
different people and all these people live inside
us. With one person we seem like this and with
another we seem very different. But we always
have the illusion of being the same person for
everybody and of always being the same person
in everything we do. But it’s not true! It’s not
true!
The Shadows Were Swarming with Us.
It is not only personality that is variable, but the very words
we use to convey our ideas are as imprecise as our
personalities. The Father explains how impossible it is to
communicate perfectly a sense of truth from one person to
another.
As early as 1904 Pirandello wrote, “If material cares
and social commitments did not distract me, I think I would
remain from morning to night here in my study at the beck
and call of the characters of my stories who are struggling
within me. Each wants to come to life before the others’.
Then again in 1911, ‘I have two or three new visitors a
week. And sometimes the crowd is such that I have to listen
to more than one of them at the same time. And sometimes
my mind is so split and so dazed that it shouts in
exasperation...the characters must go straight back to limbo,
the three of them”. (Giudice)
It was eventually not three but six who invaded his
imagination. This family group imagined in an author’s
creative mind but not yet given expression in either a play
or a story, burst their way into the reality of a theatre
company at rehearsal: their passion about the situation they
wish to have dramatized is explosive. Their story is full of
bitterness and distress, accusation and counter-accusation.
What seems truth to one is falsehood to another: what seems
cruelty to one is pity to another: what seems neglect is care.
The Actors and the Producer try to compose the family’s
story into a coherent piece of theatre, and vet, in the
characteristic paradox of Pirandello, what was Life,
dynamic and mutable shown by the Actors at the beginning,
has become flat, immutable, static and unimaginative. What
was Art, shown by the Characters, has become dynamic and
has moved into Life with a nightmarish power. The Father’s
last line is: “What do you mean, make believe? It’s real,
ladies and gentlemen! It’s reality.”
The play is a number of interdependent circles: the
outer circle is composed of us, the audience, watching a
recognizable group of people on the stage, whom we know
to be professional actors. But in a second circle, they are
representing the Actors and the Characters. In the third
circle the Characters act out their own story, and in the last
circle the Actors represent the Characters in another
rehearsal of the scenes from the Characters’ past, a past that
only existed in the world of Art, the world created by
Pirandello for them. This is the Pirandellian paradox at its
best. In the second circle he constantly explores the
variations of appearance and reality, the perpetual shifts in
personality, and he shows how a single situation has as
many truths as there are people involved in it. As the Father
says:
But isn’t that the cause of all the trouble? Words!
We all have a world of things inside ourselves
and each of us has his own private world. How
can we understand each other if the words I use
have the sense and the value that I expect them to
have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably
thinks that those same words have a different
sense and value, because of the private world he
has inside himself too. We think we understand
each other; but we never do.
In the third circle there is a brilliant demonstration of a
theatrical examination of Art and Life: this is in Act Two
when the Characters play out for the Actors the meeting of
the Father and the Stepdaughter in Madame Pace’s shop. It
is headed The Scene and is on page 109 in this edition. The
Characters recreate an event that has never been real, that
only existed imaginatively and yet their recreation is as
vivid as if it were totally true and happening at that very
moment. Here is a real reflection of an imaginary event and
it has such reality that the Producer’s interruption is a
shock: “Hold it! Hold it! Don’t put that last line down, leave
it out. It’s going well, it’s going well.” The Leading Actor
and the Father are the mask and the face of the same person:
the Leading Lady and the Stepdaughter are another mask
and face, and when the Actors attempt to recreate the scene
in the dress-shop they totally fail. They pose, they grimace,
they strike attitudes and have no truth: all they can do is to
represent inadequately. The Actors do not search for truth,
and Pirandello uses their assumption of a trite theatrical
mask to rip away theatrical pretence and show the emptiness
behind. After watching the Father play out the event that has
mortified him, that reveals himself to himself in the most
piercing and humiliating way, the Leading Actor describes
him as “an old man who has come to a knocking-shop”. The
theatre that this Leading Actor works in has no concern for
truth. All he can see and reflect is ‘The lively, knowing air
of an ageing roué’.
The Eternal Moment
51
suggests that the play still makes a powerful appeal to an
audience, still has something pertinent to say. It is, however,
as are even the few of Pirandello’s plays that are performed
in Britain, better known about than encountered, more often
read than seen.
MOTHER... to keep perpetually before me,
always real, the anguish and the torment I’ve
suffered on her account.
FATHER...to keep me too in that moment,
trapped for all eternity, chained and suspended in
that one fleeting, shameful moment of my life.
Henry IV
This is the moment when the Father, the Mother and
the Stepdaughter meet in the room behind Madame Pace’s
shop, the moment when the mirror flings the reflection back
in the face nat is looking at it: the moment of crisis.
Pirandello himself wrote:
“Am I or aren’t I?” If Six Characters is “theatrical” in
the sense that the play happens in a theatre stripped of
artifice until the Producer imposes scenery upon it, makes
truth assume an artifice, puts a mask on its face, then Henry
IV is decorated total theatre. The throne room and the castle
are theatrical representations of an architectural reality
which has itself become a total theatre where “nothing is but
what is not”. Because the central figure is thought to believe
himself to be King Henry IV, the others who serve him must
be able to improvise their roles on the basis of correct
historical information. They can step through the lookingglass, as Alice did, and join in the world on the other side,
the world where the King lives. The King has no name—
only Henry IV. That is his only reality. So we are presented
at the outset with a visual paradox—a theatrical setting of a
created castle built to support the delusion of a man who
believes himself to be someone other than the person he
really is. It has, we find later, electric lights built into the
ceiling, although, when Henry is there in this looking-glass
land, the only light is from oil-lamps. Anyone who wishes to
step through the looking-glass must play a role, assume a
costume, a mask. “We’ve a whole wardrobe through there,
all authentic costumes perfectly made to period
designs.”Anyone wearing one of these is, then, approaching
the same imaginative position that Henry occupies—
hesitating between one world and the other, permitting
questions to be asked of the sense of reality. There are over
a score of visual references in the play to role-playing and
to the historical dress that Matilda, Frida, Beicredi and the
others wear. The Pirandellian ‘mask and face’ of Six
Characters has been translated into a fuller set of images, of
costume. The mirror images are improved, or at any rate
increased, by the huge portraits which show two characters,
Henry and Matilda, fixed for eternity in a moment when
appearance became reality and Henry changed from
pretending to be the King in the pageant to believing
himself to be the King. In Act Three the young people,
Frida and Di Nolli, stand in the niches wearing the two
costumes of the portraits, and we move another step as the
painted illusion assumes a third dimension.
There is an abundance of energy in Pirandello’s work
and especially in Henry IV. Even the more philosophical
and difficult passages are infused with a burning vitality:
one is reminded of Dario Niccodemi’s description of
Pirandello reading a script to his cast. The sense of
theatricality is also very positive and we are offered more
visual colour, more involvement with a simple direct
narrative than in Six Characters. We are also offered a more
When a man lives he lives and does not see
himself. Well, put a mirror before him and make
him see himself in the act of living, under the
sway of his passions: either he remains
astonished and dumbfounded at his own
appearance, or else he turns away his eyes so as
not to see himself, or else in his disgust he spits
at his image, or again clenches his fist to break it:
and if he has been weeping, he can weep no
more: if he has been laughing he can laugh no
more, and so on. In a word, there is a crisis, and
that crisis is my theatre. (Starkie)
Six Characters is a powerful play although it has lost some
of its capacity to shock over the years: the details of the
family life of the Characters with its disruption, adultery,
prostitution, illegitimacy and potential incest are no longer
as disturbing as originally they were. Even so, the tension
inside the Characters themselves and between them as they
explain their relationship is still a vibrant dynamic force that
compels attention. One essential contrast in the play, that
between the Actors and the Characters, remains difficult to
demonstrate, despite Pirandello’s extending of the opening
scene in the 1924 text, allowing the Actors and the Producer
a longer time to establish themselves than he originally gave
them in 1921. The members of the company need to be
clear enough to act as contrasts with the Characters and yet
their contribution to the play after the first few pages is
almost negligible, except for the scene in Act Two where
the Leading Actor and Actress play out the scene in
Madame Pace’s shop. It is a paradox, although hardly a
characteristically Pirandellian one, that the failure to offer
the Actors enough to create a sufficiently strong impact is
the major weakness of the play in performance.
The play is rarely presented professionally in Britain.
In the last twenty-five years there have been only two
productions in London. In June 1963 Ralph Richardson
played the Father and Barbara Jefford the Stepdaughter at
the Mayfair Theatre in a translation by an American
playwright, Paul Avila Mayer, that had been seen earlier in
New York. Two months later Stephen Murray took over the
part of the Father. At the Greenwich Theatre in 1979, which
used the translation in this volume, the production was
sufficiently successful for the run to be extended: this
52
intense dramatic use of a ‘mad’ character, through whom
Pirandello can explore again the aspects of a personality.
Henry is the central figure, and the most important
thing about him is his madness, his delusion. It is also the
most real, the most powerful: it is more real than the castle
itself, his courtiers or his visitors, because it springs from
the imagination. “Reality resides not in the material used,
but in the life that the magic power of imagination can
awaken in it.” It is human logic, human reason that is the
evil that represses the free flow of the imagination, the “flux
of life”. By this token we must question very seriously the
proposition that a man is ‘mad’ because he seems to believe
that he is a person other than we think him to be. Notice that
Henry never declares that he is “sane”: he does use the
words “mad” and “sane” in relation to himself, but once he
has revealed to Landolfo and the others that he is no longer
“mad” he never actually claims sanity. Pirandello, through
Henry, uses this moment of dramatic character revelation to
examine the concept of reality, of sanity and insanity, of
absolute truth or indeed absolute anything.
and he presses them to represent themselves as different
from their previous idea of reality and join him in his. With
a painter’s eye, Henry arranges them, constructs his own
scene: he sits the puppets in their places and then surveys
them.
HENRY IV. There. A little light. Sit yourselves
down, round the table. Not like that! Nice
relaxed attitudes. (To ARIALDO.) You like
this...(Arranging him, then to BERTOLDO.)
And you like this...(Arranging him.) Like that,
that’s it...(Goes and sits himself.) And me here.
(Turning his head towards one of the windows.)
We should be able to order a nice decorative ray
of moonlight...But look, what a wonderful
nocturnal picture...the Emperor, with his trusty
counsellors...don’t you like it?
LANDOLFO (quietly to ARIALDO, as if not to
break the spell). Do you realise, if we’d known it
wasn’t true...
HENRY IV. What wasn’t true?
Look me carefully in the eye...I’m not saying it’s
true, don’t worry! Nothing is true! But look me
in the eye!..You know what it means to be with a
madman? To be with someone who shakes the
foundations, the logic of the whole structure of
everything you’ve built in and around yourselves.
Once again, Landolfo and the others are baffled and
uncertain about everything. The Act finishes a few lines
later with Henry returning to his kingly self as he says:
“Exactly! For real! Because that’s the only way reality is not
a joke!” And he resumes in complete seriousness, the
dictating of his memoirs to a servant, Giovanni, who is roleplaying an amanuensis of the King. The visual and the aural
drama embody the idea: the intellect and passion are
inseparable.
The play culminates in that dense moment when the
multifaceted ideas and emotions clash just before the end of
Act Three. Henry speaks to Frida, referring to his mother as
she was twenty years before, to the image that has been
thrust upon her and the image that an accident thrust upon
him. He passes to and fro through the looking-glass as
appearance and reality, time past and time present, madness
and sanity all distort and we veer chaotically with Henry
between his opposed worlds. Henry points at Di Nolli,
dressed as the King in the portrait.
This is a play that offers reminders both of Hamlet with its
assumed madness, frustrated love, sudden death and roleplaying and of King Lear with its motif: “When the mind’s
free, the body’s delicate”.
An apparent prison for Henry in the castle is no prison
when the mind is free, released by the “magic power of
imagination”: yet the body, the corporeal reality, is
vulnerable, and the result, as Henry’s worlds clash, is
disastrous. The wilful retention of the appearance of
madness has led to a very different return to the “sane”
world from the one he would have made if he had
unequivocally declared himself cured eight years before.
Belcredi feels that they have been imposed upon, and Henry
triumphs in the power he has been able to exercise,
I know very well that he can’t be me, because I
am Henry IV...I’ve been him here for twenty
years...stuck in this eternity of fancy dress!
(Indicating MATILDA.) She’s...someone I can’t
recognise...(Indicating FRIDA.)...for me she’s
always like this...What a terrible miracle! The
dream that has come to life in you...They’ve
made you flesh and blood...you’re mine...mine!
You’re mine by right!
...to make everyone who came to see me
continue...but, by God, with me in charge this
time...To make it no longer fancy dress, but a
permanent reality, the reality of true madness:
here...
A few moments after this Henry is no longer in charge: he
has killed Belcredi and is now in charge of his own crime,
immured by the need to preserve the appearance of madness
to avoid legal retribution.
This play, above any other of Pirandello’s, is full of
coups de thêãtre when intellect and passion are inextricably
bound up together. Act Two draws to an end with a riveting
theatrical image. Henry speaks to his “counsellors”, who
now know that he has pretended to madness for some time,
He puts his arms round her, laughing like a
madman, while the others all shriek in terror;
but when they rush up to pull FRIDA from him,
he becomes menacing and shouts to his four
young men:
53
Keep them back! Keep them back! I order you to
keep them back!
In 1935 Pirandeflo wrote a very moving letter to
Domenico Vittorini who was preparing a book about him. It
is worth quoting not merely for its sentiment but because it
contains a note that contradicts the common charge of
pessimism that is levelled at him.
The four youths, stunned, but acting as though
under a spell, automatically try to restrain DI
NOLLI, the DOCTOR and BELCREDI.
BELCREDI (freeing himself at once and
throwing himself on HENRY IV). Let her go!
Let her go! You’re not mad!
HENRY IV (quick as lightning, drawing the
sword from LANDOLFO’S side, who is standing
beside him). Not mad? Take that, then!
The world of international literary criticism has
been crowded for a long time with numerous
Pirandellos—lame, deformed, all head and no
heart... I am very grateful to you, my dear
Vittorini...I find in you one who...grants me as
much heart as I need to love and pity this poor
humanity of ours. I have tried to tell something to
other men, without any ambition, except perhaps
that of avenging myself for having been born.
And yet life, in spite of all that it has made me
suffer, is so beautiful! (Vittorini)
And he wounds him in the stomach. There is a
shriek of horror. Everyone rushes to prop up
BELCREDI.
The speed of thought and event is like a brightly coloured
merry-go-round out of control. The bizarre costumes and
make-up, the flashing sword catching the light, the
confusion and then the stillness and silence of the last line
of the play as the now horrified puppet, “eyes wide,
appalled at the force of his own acting”, says “Yes...no
choice now...Here together...here together...and for always!”
Henry IV was first presented on stage in February
1922 in Milan with Ruggero Ruggeri in the title role Most
of the critics admired it and some were enthusiastic. “Henry
IV...Pirandello’s masterpiece.. .above all because of the
breadth of vision.” Pirandello wrote to his daughter, Lietta,
who was then in South America with her husband: “Henry
IV has been a real triumph. Ruggeri acted magnificently and
all the daily papers have devoted two columns to the event.”
(Giudice) The play went to Turin and there it had eighteen
curtain calls on the opening night.
In Britain the first performance was by Ernest Milton
in 1924 at the Everyman Theatre in London, in a translation
by Edward Storer In 1950 Frederick May, who led a great
revival of interest in Pirandello in Britain and to whom so
many students of Pirandello are forever in debt, translated
many of the plays, including Henry IV and there was a
minor professional production in London directed by the
young Peter Hall at the Airs Theatre in 1953. Albert Finney
appeared in it at the Citizens’ Theatre, Glasgow in 1963 and
Alan Badel performed it on television in 1967 but it was not
until 1974 that the play was given a major London
production. Rex Harrison appeared in the role at Her
Majesty’s Theatre in an unpublished translation and had a
very subdued response from both critics and audience The
history of British neglect of this momentous play continued
when the National Theatre commissioned Julian Mitchell to
make the translation published in this edition but have so far
failed to stage it or any other version. Indeed, despite its
winning the 1980 John Florio translation prize it remains
unperformed
He died a year later with a play, The Mountain Giants,
unfinished He insisted on a funeral of such simplicity that
many who would have wished to pay tribute to him must
have been disappointed. But the burial was carried out as he
had instructed.
My death must be passed over in silence. No
announcements or invitations to the funeral. Do
not dress my corpse. Let me be wrapped naked in
a winding sheet. A pauper’s hearse. Bare. No one
to accompany me, neither friends nor relations.
The hearse, the horse, the driver—that is all.
He died in Rome at his flat in the Via Antonio Bosio. The
funeral took place as he had wished, but after the war the
ashes were taken to Agrigento. They were eventually buried
under the pine tree at the end of the garden of the house
where he was born, now officially known as the Casa Natale
(the birthplace) and headquarters of the Centre for
Pirandello Studies.
France gave Pirandello the Legion d’Honneur in 1923,
and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934.
The Americans received him with a great excitement in the
1923-24 tour, with Henry Ford considering his plays a good
investment. The Communist Party in Russia gave an official
blessing to his works in 1934 and approved of a publication
of the majority of his plays. The popularity of Pirandello in
Italy waned in the last seven or eight years of his life,
although naturally his Nobel Prize produced a patriotic
pleasure. His association with the Fascist party under
Mussolini earned him many opponents at the time. He was a
member of the party from 1922 onwards, but often
quarreled with it and was frequently ambiguous in his
correspondence and pronouncements. His connection
possibly came from a philosophical conflict rather than
from a committed political allegiance.
There is still only a very small quantity of Pirandello’s
work available in English. His reputation and probably his
influence rests upon a handful of plays—out of the full
The Hearse, the Horse, the Driver
54
forty-three that he wrote—together with a slightly larger
handful of short stories. Despite this, the effect of his work
on subsequent writers is generally acknowledged: no book
on the drama of the twentieth entury could possibly ignore
him and no course of lectures on the theatre could omit him.
One enthusiastic critic refers to him as “the most seminal
dramatist of our time” and credits him with anticipating
Ionesco, Albee, O’Neill, Pinter, Wilder, Giraudoux, Genet,
Camus, Sartre, Beckett, Anouilh. Claims of this sort sound
rather hysterical and one suspects that his true importance
lies not so much in the direct influence on other writers but
on the liberation of the theatre that he undoubtedly brought
about.
Pirandello himself was probably quite right in
asserting that his greatest contribution to the drama was in
the blending of intellect and passion. He used the dramatic
form to question the very form of drama itself, to question
whether drama could truly pose questions that would disturb
or enlighten us. Ionesco echoed this when he said that
“Pirandello is the manifestation of the unalterable archetype
of the idea of the theatre which we have in us”.
John Linstrum. (1985)“Introduction.” Three Pirandello.
Trans. Robert Rietty. New York: Metheun.
55
characters are possessed of this dual force: as characters in
themselves they are form— immutable and eternal—as
symbols of human beings they have form, often fighting
against the mutability of that form. When a man wishes to
stop his life in order to assume an unchangeable form, as is
the case of Henry IV, he no longer lives; or he tries to
change his life into a form created by his imagination, or
tries to become his own character in an illusionary comedy
as in II Giuoco Delle Parti (The Play of Parts, 1913), which
is the play the Director in Six Characters happens to be
rehearsing when the six characters walk into the theatre.
Pirandello observes often in the Preface that in Six
Characters an orderly and sequential dramatic
development, in the traditional sense of the term, is lacking.
But this is not accidental. The drama of the six characters is
not one that could be organized in the mind of the author,
whatever the outcome of telling their story might be.
Dramatic construction must instead bend itself to present a
drama refused by that author. The six characters are caught
in an effort to represent themselves seeking a life. And so
the comedy is built around “situations”, lacking logical
development, which are continually interrupted and
contradicted. So that the universal sense that Pirandello is
seeking may be clear, it is necessary to pay attention to the
value he gives to the words “spirit”and “nature”. Again it is
the Preface that helps us. The Father, Daughter and Son are
realized as “spirit”, while the Mother is realized as “nature”.
“Spirit” for Pirandello is equivalent, in our view, to the
pure intellectual force, to the possibility, that is, of
understanding oneself fully, one’s own capacities, and even
more important, the limits of one’s intelligence and
knowledge. At an inferior level, precisely because she is
unconscious of herself and her limits, is “nature”. The
Mother of Six Characters is not even conscious of being a
character. She arrives on stage with the other characters but
does not know why. She knows only that she is Mother, and
as Mother she knows only that she must follow her family.
Pirandello addresses this problem only in Six Characters
and in the Preface; however, precedents do exist. In So It Is
(If You Think So), for example, a clear contrapositioning of
“spirit” and “nature” occurs: Laudisi, who appears as
‘spirit’ in the comedy, laughs at all the other characters,
who exhaust themselves seeking the truth. Laudisi knows
himself and the limits of his understanding; he knows the
past and has already discounted for himself that the truth
can ever be discovered. In a certain sense Laudisi is beyond
any truth, and throughout the play he remains as if outside
it. “Spirit” laughs at “nature”; “nature” itself can only weep,
because it does not understand.
Examining Six Characters we see how Pirandello
weaves together three levels of drama: the drama of the six
characters refused by their author, who must struggle to
realize themselves and fix their action in a play written by
another; the human drama of suffering that each of the six
characters lives; and the drama that Pirandello himself
attempts to represent for the first time: his fantasy in the act
of creation.
Introduction
By Mark Musa
In 1924 Pirandello added to his comedy Six
Characters in Search of an Author written three years
before a Preface. It was conceived in a polemical spirit, in
part directed to his critics as self—defence and
counter-argument and in part to his audience, who had
refused to understand his art. But even now it assumes for
the critic a capital importance: it is the key to penetrating
the not—easy Pirandellian world and is a sure aid to
interpreting not only the play that the Preface discusses but
also So It Is (If You Think So) and Henry IV.
In the first part of the Preface Pirandello discusses his
theory of art; in the second he presents a critical
interpretation of his Six Characters. It is the first part that I
find most interesting. Pirandello, servant of “fantasia”—the
inventive force—needs to interpret that which his
imagination creates from a universal point of view The
imagination has an absolute value, autonomous and present
in each author as nature spontaneously revealed.
“The mystery of artistic creation”, Pirandello writes in
the Preface, “is the same mystery as natural birth.” Nature is
a creative force, and an author is nothing other than a means
through which nature proceeds and works and produces. An
author has only two choices: either accept that nature works
through him as medium, so that the creation of art takes
place, or refuse to provide a medium for nature, so that
creation is renounced.
In the second part of the Preface Pirandello discusses a
problem which is fundamental to Six Characters as well as
the other plays in this collection: the conflict between
“having form” and “being form”. All that which “has form”
is condemned to continual change, which ends by
destroying that form. All that which ‘is form’ is immutable
and eternal both in time and in space. Every work of art,
every character born alive in the mind of an author and
fixed in life by means of the word, is form. A character is
static in form and cannot ever undergo change. A human
being who ‘has form’ because of his very nature will be
constrained to act entirely differently, changing from day to
day.
The problem is at the centre of the Pirandellian
thematic, one he will address again in Vestire Gli Ignudi (To
Dress the Naked, 1922). But here he limits it to the human
condition without touching on the life of art. The
protagonist Ersilia wants to fix herself in a form that would
make her appear better than she is, and then to attempt
suicide. In Six Characters the attempt is double: the Father,
like every other character, is form, but as human symbol he
rebels against the fixity of the form in which he feels
himself bound. The Father suffers from having been caught
in a particular moment of his life and to have been judged
solely for this. It is a position opposite to that of Ersilia. For
any human, both positions are false. In human affairs there
cannot be fixity of form. Nevertheless, all of Pirandello’s
56
It is a completely new undertaking that requires new
solutions. And Pirandello seeks and experiments with a
technical solution, creating the new perspective of
descending values, with character-spirit, character-nature,
and character-presence; and a philosophical solution,
counterposing that which is form and that which has form.
The greater or lesser understanding of the various characters
in the face of the problem creates the completely new
perspective in which Pirandello fixes them: spirit, nature
and pure presence. As created characters they are stable,
immutable and eternal truth; as human figures they are
unstable, changeable and ephemeral reality, like the
Director and the actors. At the end of the play, when the
characters have completed the action they are compelled to
complete, the Young Boy commits suicide. A great
confusion arises on stage. One actor shouts, “Reality!”—the
Young Boy is truly dead. Others cannot believe it and shout,
“Make-believe!”—the Young Boy cannot be dead. Among
the contrasting voices rebounds that of the Father: “But
what make-believe! Reality, reality, sir! Reality!” Having
intuited a new dimension, Pirandello must construct his play
in a new way. That which may appear as illogical
construction or disordered dramatic development is instead
the resolution of the true drama of the creating author, who
necessarily constructs “illogically”, by means of scenes and
“situations” oddly juxtaposed.
The original idea for the events Pirandello exploits in
Six Characters first came to his mind as material for a
novel. But he refused to write that novel. Even though there
was plenty of interesting material, to Pirandello it seemed to
lack that universality for which, and only for which, he
chose to write. He could not narrate, as some others did,
only for the pleasure of narrating. He wanted more from his
art, and that something was absent.
In 1910, Pirandello saw Six Characters as a tragic plot
and nothing more. So he abandoned the idea. Only eleven
years later, in 1925, did he finally find a way to use the
tragic plot and add to it that which was lacking. In sending
the six characters in search of another author be found a
universal sense: to translate into images his fantasy in the
act of creating. Even in 1917, the story tormented him, and
Pirandello was still seeking a solution, as he reveals in the
following light-hearted comment:
And a strangeness so sad, so sad: Six Characters
in Search of an Author; a novel to be written.
Perhaps you understand. Six characters, taken up
in a terrible drama, who come up close to me, to
be composed in a novel, an obsession, and I don’t
want to know about it, and I say to them that it is
useless and they don’t matter to me, and that
nothing any longer matters to me; and they who
show me all of their wounds, I chase them away
— and so at the end the novel to be written will
come out to be written. And many, many other
ideas I still have in mind. (Rome, 23 July 1917)
in conversation with a character, Doctor Fileno, who had
come forth for the first time the night before from the pages
of a novel someone had given Pirandello to read. The
character laments about an author unable to understand him
and begs Pirandello to write about him again, in order to
give him the life to which he rightly aspires. Pirandello
agrees that his author has not made good use of him;
however, he refuses his request. The following is the
argument the Doctor uses to plead his cause before his new
author. It is clear that here is the germ of Pirandello’s play.
Doctor Fileno speaks the same words and phrases which
Pirandello will put into the mouth of the Father ten years
later:
No one can know better than yourself that we are
living beings, more alive than those who breathe
and dress; perhaps we are less real, but we are
certainly more true. One is born into the world in
many different ways and you know that nature
serves as the instrument of the human fantasy to
continue her work of creation. And he who is
fortunate enough to be born of the creative
activity of the spirit of man is given by nature a
longer and more superior life than he who is born
of the womb. He who is born a character, who is
so lucky to be born alive, does not have to worry
about dying. He never dies. Man dies, the writer,
the natural instrument of nature dies, but the
created character never dies. And in order to live
eternally he need not be of exceptional calibre.
Tell me, who was Sancho Panza? Tell me, who
was Don Abbondio? And yet they live eternally.
As living germs they had the good fortune to find
a very fertile fantasy, a fantasy that knew how to
raise them and nourish them for eternity.
The stages of this play can be summarized in this way:
1950, the incident; 1911, one character who seeks an
author; 19I7, the possibility of applying Doctor Fileno’s
drama to the incident of the six characters; 1925, the play;
1924, the Preface to the comedy. The cycle begun in 1910
is finally concluded. To what we might call this external
story, may be added an internal story: one that leads up to
the new positions of thought Pirandello reached in 1921.
Let us refer back to Pensaci Giacomino (Think About It,
Giacomino) and Liolà, both of 1956. Here there is nothing
to be found to anticipate what comes. The conflict between
having form and being form has not even been suggested.
These are only human dramas of characters who fight each
other and within themselves. Then, in 1917, Pirandello
directly confronts the problem of truth in So it Is (If You
Think So). The central poetic of the work (just as for the
novel that preceded the play) is the human impossibility of
reaching truth or even determining if truth exists. Truth
must exist, Pirandello seems to say, but finding it is beyond
human capability. Truth appears behind a thick black veil
and reveals itself as that which each one of us desires it to
be. Truth, then, is relative. That which is true for one person
In the short story La Tragedia di un Personaggio (The
Tragedy of a Character, 1911), Pirandello presents himself
57
may not be true for another. Each person sees, through an
impenetrable veil, a vague phantasm which he or she gives
the name of truth, but it is only his or her truth.
So It Is (If You Think So) is considered to be
Pirandello’s major to the so-called “theatre of the
grotesque”—a name given to an innovative type of
tragicomic drama which appeared in Italy as a reaction to
naturalism and in which characters are treated like puppets
controlled by blind, mysterious forces. There is no
development of character in the play. The fact that
Pirandello added to the title of the play “A Parable”
indicates that the recreation of reality is nor his main
concern and the action of the play has little to do with the
external circumstances of the unreal realness of the
story-plot.
The play is about the futile attempt on the
part of a group of townspeople to establish whether it is
Signor Ponza or Signora Frola, his mother-in-law, who is
crazy concerning the identity of Signor Ponza’s wife.
According to Frola she is her daughter; for Ponza she is not
the daughter of Frola but rather his new second wife. Ponza,
the newly arrived secretary of the town’s prefect, becomes
the centre of interest for the unmerciful curiosity of middleclass superiority. The “truth” for which the play searches is
not so much in the heavily veiled figure whose voice is
heard but once at the end of the play as it is in the play’s
very structure and symmetrical design itself: in the first act
Ponza and Frola make their case and produce evidence to
support it; in act two Ponza and Frola confront one another;
act three is the conclusion where the supposed revelation of
the “truth” takes place. In the meantime the character of
Laudisi seems to be floating above this formal structure, as
each act ends in silence followed by his burst of laughter.
The issue is not whether the Agazzi family and friends
can find out the truth about the Ponza-Frola family but
whether they should be doing so at all. This Laudisi makes
quite clear in the course of the play. While the audience
may be asking itself, as is the chorus of townspeople on
stage, “Who is lying?” the fact remains that it is the
insensitivity of the Agazzi clan and the pain resulting from
it that holds the play together and moves it along. And the
message of the play may well be that whether or not that
veiled lady be Frola’s daughter or Ponza’s second wife, she
does not exist in or for herself; she exists only in so far as
Ponza and Frola exist—she is there for them and for each of
them in his or her own way. Truth then is Love and
Compassion.
The plea for compassion and disinterested love that
underlies So It Is, and which is the structure supporting the
actions of Ponza, his wife and his mother-in-law, is not
present in Six Characters and Henry IV. What these three
plays do have in common, however, is the confrontation of
form and life. I believe the themes that preoccupied
Pirandello the most are all to be found in one way or
another in Henry IV: the relativity of language, perception
and freedom, the game of life with people assigned to
various roles, madness, “being form” and “having form”,
reality and illusion are some of them.
Pirandello began writing Henry IV immediately after
the opening fiasco of Six Characters in Rome. He wrote it
in four months. He will never deal with the theme of
madness in any of the twenty plays he writes after that. The
play opened in Milan on 24 February 1922. The critics had
their reservations about it, but compared to Six Characters
it was well received. Only one critic, Silvio d’Amico,
claimed it was a masterpiece. It was not until Six Characters
had its enormous success in Paris the following year that the
critics unanimously agreed on masterpiece status for Henry
IV.
The play, which is subtitled “A Tragedy”, is traditional
in its structure. It respects the Aristotelian unities and has a
climax and denouement, all of which are not easily found in
Six Characters. The elements are logically and clearly
presented in spite of the fact that the protagonist is both
sane and insane. Henry lives in the world of art; his world is
one he, a mad man, has created himself, having left the
world of the living for the ideal work of art. He is a part of
history in which nothing changes, since events have been
lived out and fixed in immutable form. With history every
effect follows its cause. This is the cry of the Father in Six
Characters and it is what Henry announces to his Secret
Counsellors who are so important to an understanding of
Henry’s psyche early in the play. Henry appears rather late
in the first act and only after a long and lively scene during
which the Counsellors step in and out of their roles—
moving from history (“being form”) to their present-day
selves (“having form”) as they train a new member of their
group who has just joined them and who has for months
been preparing himself for the wrong part in their play
within a play.
Henry IV, the man with no name of his own (his name
is followed by dots in the list of characters), is both an actor
in Pirandello’s play and the star of his own play which he
also happens to be directing in a stage setting of his own
choosing. Henry, like mentor Pirandello, becomes the
creative artist himself as he creates his own play within a
play. He also directs it and is his own make-up artist and
wardrobe man, and at times in the play we even catch him
watching himself perform — as would an audience. The
play, like Six Characters then, is a play within a play and
like So It Is deals with relativism: how crazy is crazy? And
even the plea for compassion and love mentioned earlier in
connection with So It Is is answered in a brief scene
between Henry and his old servant John. But Henry IV is
much more: like no other character in Pirandello’s large
corpus of plays Henry seems to have it all! He is theatre in
all its many facets! And with the words “per sempre”
(“forever”) he brings the curtain down on his tragedy as he
who “has form”
“becomes form”: illusion virtually
becomes reality.
Mark Musa. (1995). “Introduction.” Six Characters in
Search of an Author. London: Penguin Twentieth Century
Classics.
58
one common origin and mutual entanglement of their
affairs, while I had them enter the world of art, constructing
from their persons, their passions, and their adventures a
novel, a drama, or at least a story.
Born alive, they wished to live.
To me it was never enough to present a man or a
woman and what is special and characteristic about them
simply for the pleasure of presenting them; to narrate a
particular affair, lively or sad, simply for the pleasure of
narrating it; to describe a landscape simply for the pleasure
of describing it.
There are some writers (and not a few) who do feel
this pleasure and, satisfied, ask no more. They are, to speak
more precisely, historical writers.
But there are others who, beyond such pleasure, feel a
more profound spiritual need on whose account they admit
only figures, affairs, landscapes which have been soaked, so
to speak, in a particular sense of life and acquire from it a
universal value. These are, more precisely philosophical
writers.
I have the misfortune to belong to these last.
I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all
spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an
allegory—a vain and misconceived effort because the very
fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly
shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no
truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the
demonstration of some moral truth. The spiritual need I
speak of cannot be satisfied or seldom, and that to the end
of a superior irony, as for example in Ariosto—by such
allegorical symbolism. This latter starts from a concept, and
from a concept which creates or tries to create for itself an
image. The former on the other hand seeks in the image—
which must remain alive and free throughout - a meaning to
give it value.
Now, however much I sought, I did not succeed in
uncovering this meaning in the six characters. And I
concluded therefore that it was no use making them live.
I thought to myself: "I have already afflicted my
readers with hundreds and hundreds of stories. Why should
I afflict them now by narrating the sad entanglements of
these six unfortunates?"
And, thinking thus, I put them away from me. Or
rather I did all I could to put them away
But one doesn't give life to a character for nothing.
Creatures of my spirit, these six were already living a
life which was their own and not mine any more, a life
which it was not in my power any more to deny them.
Thus it is that while I persisted in desiring to drive
them out of my spirit, they as if completely detached from
every narrative support, characters from a novel
miraculously emerging from the pages of the book that
contained them, went on living on their own, choosing
certain moments of the day to reappear before me in the
solitude of my study and coming now one, now the other,
now two together—to tempt me, to propose that I present or
describe this scene or that, to explain the effects that could
The Author's Preface (1925)
By Luigi Pirandello
It seems like yesterday but is actually many years ago
that a nimble little maidservant entered the service of my art
However, she always comes fresh to the job.
She is called Fantasy.
A little puckish and malicious, if she likes to dress in
black no one will wish to deny that she is often positively
bizarre and no one will wish to believe that she always does
everything in the same way and in earnest. She sticks her
hand in her pocket, pulls out a cap and bells, sets it on her
head, red as a cock's comb, and dashes away Here today,
there tomorrow. And she amuses herself by bringing to my
house since I derive stories and novels and plays from them
—the most disgruntled tribe in the world, men, women,
children, involved in strange adventures which they can find
no way out of; thwarted in their plans; cheated in their
hopes; with whom, in short, it is often torture to deal.
Well, this little maidservant of mine, Fantasy, several
years ago, had the bad inspiration or ill-omened caprice to
bring a family into my house. I wouldn't know where she
fished them up or how, but, according to her, I could find in
them the subject for a magnificent novel.
I found before me a man about fifty years old, in a
dark jacket and light trousers, with a frowning air and illnatured, mortified eyes; a poor woman in widow's weeds
leading by one hand a little girl of four and by the other a
boy of rather more than ten; a cheeky and "sexy" girl, also
clad in black but with an equivocal and brazen pomp, all a
tremble with a lively, biting contempt for the mortified old
man and for a young fellow of twenty who stood on one
side closed in on himself as if he despised them all. In short,
the six characters who are seen coming on stage at the
beginning of the play. Now one of them and now another—
often beating down one another — embarked on the sad
story of their adventures, each shouting his own reasons,
and projecting in my face his disordered passions, more or
less as they do in the play to the unhappy Manager.
What author will be able to say how and why a
character was born in his fantasy? The mystery of artistic
creation is the same as that of birth. A woman who loves
may desire to become a mother; but the desire by itself,
however intense, cannot suffice. One fine day she will find
herself a mother without having any precise intimation when
it began. In the same way an artist imbibes very many germs
of life and can never say how and why, at a certain moment,
one of these vital germs inserts itself into his fantasy there
to become a living creature on a plane of life superior to the
changeable existence of every day.
I can only say that, without having made any effort to
seek them out, I found before me, alive—you could touch
them and even hear them breath—the six characters now
seen on the stage. And they stayed there in my presence,
each with his secret torment and all bound together by the
59
be secured with them, the new interest which a certain
unusual situation could provide, and so forth.
For a moment I let myself be won over. And this
condescension of mine, thus letting myself go for a while,
was enough, because they drew from it a new increment of
life, a greater degree of clarity and addition, consequently a
greater degree of persuasive power over me. And thus as it
became gradually harder and harder for me to go back and
free myself from them, it became easier and easier for them
to come back and tempt me. At a certain point I actually
became obsessed with them. Until, all of a sudden, a way
out of the difficulty flashed upon me.
"Why not," I said to myself, "present this highly
strange fact of an author who refuses to let some of his
characters live though they have been born in his fantasy,
and the fact that these characters, having by now life in their
veins, do not resign themselves to remaining excluded from
the world of art? They are detached from me; live on their
own; have acquired voice and movement; have by
themselves—in this struggle for existence that they have
had to wage with me— become dramatic characters,
characters that can move and talk on their own initiative;
already see themselves as such; have learned to defend
themselves against me; will even know how to defend
themselves against others. And so let them go where
dramatic characters do go to have life: on a stage. And let us
see what will happen."
That's what I did. And, naturally, the result was what it
had to be: a mixture of tragic and comic, fantastic and
realistic, in a humorous situation that was quite new and
infinitely complex, a drama which is conveyed by means of
the characters, who carry it within them and suffer it, a
drama, breathing, speaking, self-propelled, which seeks at
all costs to find the means of its own presentation; and the
comedy of the vain attempt at an improvised realization of
the drama on stage. First, the surprise of the poor actors in a
theatrical company rehearsing a play by day on a bare stage
(no scenery, no flats). Surprise and incredulity at the sight
of the six characters announcing themselves as such in
search of an author. Then, immediately afterwards, through
that sudden fainting fit of the Mother veiled in black, their
instinctive interest in the drama of which they catch a
glimpse in her and in the other members of the strange
family an obscure, ambiguous drama, coming about so
unexpectedly on a stage that is empty and unprepared to
receive it. And gradually the growth of this interest to the
bursting forth of the contrasting passions of Father, of StepDaughter, of Son, of that poor Mother, passions seeking, as
I said, to overwhelm each other with a tragic, lacerating
fury.
And here is the universal meaning at first vainly
sought in the six characters, now that, going on stage of
their own accord, they succeed in finding it within
themselves in the excitement of the desperate struggle
which each wages against the other and all wage against the
Manager and the actors, who do not understand them.
Without wanting to, without knowing it, in the strife of
their bedeviled souls, each of them, defending himself
against the accusations of the others, expresses as his own
living passion and torment, the passion and torment which
for so many years have been the pangs of my spirit the
deceit of mutual understanding irremediably founded on the
empty abstraction of the words, the multiple personality of
everyone corresponding to the possibilities of being to be
found in each of us, and finally the inherent tragic conflict
between life (which is always moving and changing) and
form which fixes it, immutable.
Two, above all among the six characters, the Father
and the Step-Daughter, speak of that outrageous unalterable
fixity of their form in which he and she see their essential
nature expressed permanently and immutably, a nature that
for one means punishment and for the other revenge; and
they defend it against the factitious affectations and unaware
volatility of the actors, and they try to impose it on the
vulgar Manager who would like to change it and adapt it to
the so-called exigencies of the theatre.
If the six characters don't all seem to exist on the same
plane, it is not because some are figures of first rank and
others of the second, that is, some are main characters and
others minor ones—the elementary perspective necessary to
all scenic or narrative art—nor is it that any are not
completely created for their purpose. They are all six at the
same point of artistic realization and on the same level of
reality, which is the fantastic level of the whole play. Except
that the Father, the Step-Daughter, and also the Son are
realized as mind; the Mother as nature; the Boy as a
presence watching and performing a gesture and the Baby
unaware of it all. This fact creates among them a
perspective of a new sort. Unconsciously I had had the
impression that some of them needed to be fully realized
(artistically speaking), others less so, and others merely
sketched in as elements in a narrative or presentational
sequence: the most alive, the most completely created, are
the Father and the Step-Daughter who naturally stand out
more and lead the way, dragging themselves along beside
the almost dead weight of the others—first, the Son, holding
back; second, the Mother, like a victim resigned to her fate,
between the two children who have hardly any substance
beyond their appearance and who need to be led by the
hand.
And actually! actually they had each to appear in that
stage of creation which they had attained in the author's
fantasy at the moment when he wished to drive them away.
If I now think about these things, about having intuited
that necessity, having unconsciously found the way to
resolve it by means of a new perspective, and about the way
in which l actually obtained it, they seem like miracles. The
fact is that the play was really conceived in one of those
spontaneous illuminations of the fantasy all the elements of
the mind answer to each other’s call and work in divine
accord. No human brain, working "in the cold," however
stirred up it might be, could ever have succeeded in
60
penetrating in far enough, could ever have been in a
position to satisfy all the exigencies of the play's form.
Therefore the reasons which I will give to charity the values
of the play must not be thought of as intentions that I
conceived beforehand when I prepared myself for the job
and which I now undertake to defend, but only as
discoveries which I have been able to make afterwards in
tranquillity.
I wanted to present six characters seeking an author.
Their play does not manage to get presented precisely
because the author whom they seek is missing. Instead is
presented the comedy of their vain attempt with all that it
contains of tragedy by virtue of the fact that the six
characters have been rejected.
But can one present a character while rejecting him?
Obviously, to present him one needs, on the contrary, to
receive him into one's fantasy before one can express him.
And I have actually accepted and realized the six characters:
I have, however, accepted and realized them as rejected: in
search of another author.
What have I rejected of them? Not themselves, obviously, but their drama, which doubtless is what interests
them above all but which did not interest me for the reasons
already indicated.
And what is it, for a character—his drama?
Every creature of fantasy and art, in order to exist,
must have his drama, that is, a drama in which he may be a
character and for which he is a character. This drama is the
character s raison d’etre, his vital function, necessary for
his existence.
In these six, then, I have accepted the “being” without
the reason for being. I have taken the organism and
entrusted to it, not its own proper function, but another
more complex function into its own function entered, if at
all, only as a datum. A terrible and desperate situation
especially for the two—Father and Step-Daughter—who
more than the others feel themselves to be characters, that
is, absolutely need a drama and therefore their own drama—
the only one which they can envisage for themselves yet
which meantime they see rejected: an "impossible" situation
from which they feel they must escape at whatever cost; it is
a matter of life and death. True, I have given them another
raison d'etre, another function: precisely that "impossible"
situation, the drama of being in search of an author and
rejected. But that this should be a raison d'etre, that it
should have become their real function, that it should be
necessary, that it should suffice, they can hardly suppose;
for they have a life of their own. If someone were to tell
them, they wouldn't believe him. It is not possible to believe
that the sole reason for our living should lie in a torment
that seems to us unjust and inexplicable.
I cannot imagine, therefore, why the charge was
brought against me that the character of the Father was not
what it should have been because it stepped out of its
quality and position as a character and invaded at times the
author's province and took it over. I, who understand those
who don't quite understand me, see that the charge derives
from the fact that the character expresses and makes his own
a torment of spirit which is recognized as mine. Which is
entirely natural and of absolutely no significance. Aside
from the fact that this torment of spirit in the character of
the Father derives from causes, and is suffered and lived for
reasons, that have nothing to do with the drama of my
personal experience, a fact which alone removes all
substance from the criticism, I want to make it clear that the
inherent torment of my spirit is one thing, a torment which I
can legitimately—provided that it be organic—reflect in a
character, and that the activity of my spirit as revealed in the
realized work, the activity that succeeds in forming a drama
out of the six characters in search of an author is another
thing. If the Father participated in this latter activity, if he
competed in forming the drama of the six characters without
an author, then and only then would it by all means be
justified to say that he was at times the author himself and
therefore not the man he should be. But the Father suffers
and does not create his existence as a character in search of
an author. He suffers it as an inexplicable fatality and as a
situation which he tries with all his powers to rebel against,
which he tries to remedy: hence it is that he is a character in
search of an author and nothing more, even if he expresses
as his own the torment of my spirit. If he, so to assumed
some of the author's responsibilities, the fatality would be
completely explained. He would, that is to say, see himself
accepted, if only as a rejected character, accepted in the
poet's heart of hearts, and he would no longer have any
reason to suffer the despair of not finding someone to
construct and affirm his life as a character. I mean that he
would quite willingly accept the raison d'etre which the
author gives him and without regrets would forego his own,
throwing over the Manager and the actors to whom in fact
he runs as his only recourse.
There is one character, that of the Mother, who on the
other hand does not care about being alive (considering
being alive as an end in itself). She hasn't the least suspicion
that she is not alive. It has never occurred to her to ask how
and why and in what manner she lives. In short, she is not
aware of being a character, inasmuch as she is never, even
for a moment, detached from her role. She doesn't know she
has a role.
This makes her perfectly organic. Indeed, her role of
Mother does not of itself, in its natural essence, embrace
mental activity. And she does not exist as a mind. She lives
in an endless continuum of feeling, and therefore she cannot
acquire awareness of her life that is, of her existence as a
character. But with all this, even she, in her own way and
for her own ends, seeks an author, and at a certain stage
seems happy to have been brought before the Manager.
Because she hopes to take life from him, perhaps? No:
because she hopes the Manager will have her present a
scene with the Son in which she would put so much of her
own life. But it is a scene which does not exist, which never
has and never could take place. So unaware is she of being a
61
character, that is, of the life that is possible to her, all fixed
and determined, moment by moment, in every action, every
phrase.
She appears on stage with the other characters but
without understanding what the others make her do.
Obviously, she imagines that the itch for life with which the
husband and the daughter are afflicted and for which she
herself is to be found on stage is no more than one of the
usual incomprehensible extravagances of this man who is
both tortured and torturer and—horrible, most horrible—a
new equivocal rebellion on the part of that poor erring girl.
The Mother is completely passive. The events of her own
life and the values they assume in her eyes, her very
character, are all things which are "said" by the others and
which she only once contradicts, and that because the
maternal instinct rises up and rebels within her to make it
clear that she didn't at all wish to abandon either the son or
the husband: the Son was taken from her and the husband
forced her to abandon him. She is only correcting data; she
explains and knows nothing.
In short, she is nature. Nature fixed in the figure of a
mother.
This character gave me a satisfaction of a new sort, not
to be ignored. Nearly all my critics, instead of defining her,
after their habit, as "unhuman"—which seems to be the
peculiar and incorrigible characteristic of all my creatures
without exception—had the goodness to note "with real
pleasure" that at last a very human figure had emerged from
my fantasy. I explain this praise to myself in the following
way: since my poor Mother is entirely limited to the natural
attitude of a Mother with no possibility of free mental
activity, being, that is, little more than a lump of flesh
completely alive in all its functions—procreation, lactation,
caring for and loving its young—without any need therefore
of exercising her brain, she realizes in her person the true
and complete "human type." That must be how it is, since in
a human organism nothing seems more superfluous than the
mind.
But the critics have tried to get rid of the Mother with
this praise without bothering to penetrate the nucleus of
poetic values which the character in the play represents. A
very human figure, certainly, because mindless, that is,
unaware of being what she is or not caring to explain it to
herself. But not knowing that she is a character doesn't
prevent her from being one. That is her drama in my play.
And the most living expression of it comes spurting out in
her cry to the Manager who wants her to think all these
things have happened already and therefore cannot now be a
reason for renewed lamentations: "No, it's happening now,
it's happening always! My torture is not a pretense, signore!
I am alive and present, always, in every moment of my
torture: it is renewed, alive and present, always!" This she
feels, without being conscious of it, and feels it therefore as
something inexplicable: but she feels it so terribly that she
doesn't think it can be something to explain either to herself
or to others. She feels it and that is that. She feels it as pain,
and this pain is immediate; she cries it out. Thus she reflects
the growing fixity of life in a form— the same thing, which
in another way tortures the Father and the Step-Daughter. In
them, mind. In her, nature. The mind rebels and, as best it
may, seeks an advantage; nature, if not aroused by sensory
stimuli, weeps.
Conflict between life-in-movement and form is the
inexorable condition not only of the mental but also of the
physical order. The life which in order to exist has become
fixed in our corporeal form little by little kills that form.
The tears of a nature thus fixed lament the irreparable,
continuous aging of our bodies. Hence the tears of the
Mother are passive and perpetual. Revealed in three faces,
made significant in three distinct and simultaneous dramas,
this inherent conflict finds in the play its most complete
expression. More: the Mother declares also the particular
value of artistic form—a form which does not delimit or
destroy its own life and which life does not consume—in
her cry to the Manager. If the Father and Step-Daughter
began their scene a hundred thousand times in succession,
always, at the appointed moment, at the instant when the life
of the work of art must be expressed with that cry, it would
always be heard, unaltered and unalterable in its form, not
as a mechanical repetition, not as a return determined by
external necessities but on the contrary, alive every time and
as new, suddenly born thus forever! Embalmed alive in its
incorruptible form. Hence, always, as we open the books,
we shall find Francesca alive and confessing to Dante her
sin, and if we turn to the passage a hundred thousand times
in succession a hundred thousand times in succession
Francesca will speak her words, never repeating them
mechanically, but saying them as though each time were the
first time with such living and sudden passion that Dante
every time will turn faint. All that lives, by the fact of living,
has a form, and by the same token must die—except the
work of art which lives forever in so far as it is form.
The birth of a creature of human fantasy, a birth which
is a step across the threshold between nothing and eternity,
can also happen suddenly, occasioned by some necessity An
imagined drama needs a character who does or says a
certain necessary thing; accordingly this character is born
and is precisely what he had to be. In this way Madame
Pace is born among the six characters and seems a miracle,
even a trick, realistically portrayed on the stage. It is no
trick. The birth is real. The new character is alive not
because she was alive already but because she is now
happily born as is required by the act of her being a
character—he is obliged to be as she is. There is a break
here, a sudden change in the level of reality of the scene,
because a character can be born in this way only in the
poet's fancy and not on the boards of a stage. Without anyone's noticing it, I have all of a sudden changed the scene: I
have gathered it up again into my own fantasy without
removing it from the spectator's eyes. That is, I have shown
them, instead of the stage, my own fantasy in the act of
creating—my own fantasy in the form of this same stage.
62
The sudden and uncontrollable changing of a visual
phenomenon from one level of reality to another is a
miracle comparable to those of the saint who sets his own
statue in motion: it is neither wood nor stone at such a
moment. But the miracle is not arbitrary. The stage—a stage
which accepts the fantastic reality of the six characters—is
no fixed, immutable datum. Nothing in this play exists as
given and preconceived. Everything is in the making, is in
motion, is a sudden experiment: even the place in which this
unformed life, reaching after its own form, changes and
changes again contrives to shift position organically. The
level of reality changes. When I had the idea of bringing
Madame Pace to birth right there on the stage, I felt I could
do it and I did it. Had I noticed that this birth was unhinging
and silently unnoticed, in a second, giving another shape,
another reality to my scene, I certainly wouldn't have
brought it about. I would have been afraid of the apparent
lack of logic. And I would have committed an ill-omened
assault on the beauty of my work. The fervor of my mind
saved me from doing so. For, despite appearances, with
their specious logic, this fantastic birth is sustained by a real
necessity in mysterious, organic relation with the whole life
of the work.
That someone now tells me it hasn't all the value it
could have because its expression is not constructed but
chaotic, because it smacks of romanticism, makes me smile.
I understand why this observation was made to me:
because in this work of mine the presentation of the drama
in which the six characters are involved appears tumultuous
and never proceeds in an orderly manner. There is no logical development, no concatenation of the events. Very true.
Had I hunted it with a lamp I could have found a more
disordered, crazy arbitrary complicated, in short, romantic
way of presenting "the drama in which the six characters are
involved." Very true. But I have not presented that drama. I
have presented another—and I won't undertake to say again
what!—in which, among the many fine things that everyone,
according to his tastes, can find there is a discreet satire on
romantic procedures: in the six characters thus excited to
the point where they stifle themselves in the roles which
each of them plays in a certain drama while I present them
as characters in another play which they don't know and
don't suspect the existence of, so that this inflammation of
their passions - which belongs to the realm of romantic
procedure - is humorously "placed," located in the void.
And the drama of the six characters presented not as it
would have been organized by my fantasy had it been
accepted but in this way as a rejected drama, could not exist
in the work except as a situation," with some little
development, and could not come out except in indications,
stormily disorderedly, in violent foreshortenings, in a
chaotic manner: continually interrupted, sidetracked,
contradicted (by one of its characters), denied, and (by two
others) not even seen.
There is a character indeed—he who denies the drama
which makes him a character, the Son—who draws all his
importance and value from being a character not of the
comedy in the making—which as such hardly appears—but
from the presentation that I made of it. In short, he is the
only one who lives solely as “a character in search of an
author”—inasmuch as the author he seeks is not a dramatic
author. Even this could not be otherwise. The character's
attitude is an organic product of my conception, and it is
logical that in the situation it should produce greater
confusion and disorder and another element of romantic
contrast.
But I had precisely to present this organic and natural
chaos. And to present a chaos is not at all to present
chaotically that is, romantically. That my presentation is the
reverse of confused, that it is quite simple, clear, and
orderly, is proved by the clarity which the intrigue, the
characters, the fantastic and realistic, dramatic and comic
levels of the work have had for every public in the world
and by the way in which, for those with more searching
vision, the unusual values enclosed within it come out.
Great is the confusion of tongues among men if
criticisms thus made find words for their expression. No
less great than this confusion is the intimate law of order
which, obeyed in all points, makes this work of mine
classical and typical and at its catastrophic close forbids the
use of words. Though the audience eventually understands
that one does not create life by artifice and that the drama of
the six characters cannot be presented without an author to
give them value with his spirit, the Manager remains vulgarly anxious to know how the thing turned out, and the
“ending” is remembered by the Son in its sequence of actual
moments, but without any sense and therefore not needing a
human voice for its expression. It happens stupidly,
uselessly, with the going-off of a mechanical weapon on
stage. It breaks up and disperses the sterile experiment of
the characters and the actors, which has apparently been
made without the assistance of the poet.
The poet, unknown to them, as if looking on at a
distance during the whole period of the experiment, was at
the same time busy creating—with it and of it—his own
play.
Luigi Pirandello. (1998). “The Author’s Preface (1925)”.
Six Characters in Search of an Author. Translated by Eric
Bentley. New York: Signet Classics.
63
Nobel Prize Banquet Speech
By Luigi Pirandello
Delivered at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in
Stockholm, December 10, 1934
(Translation)
I take deep satisfaction in expressing my respectful
gratitude to Your Majesties for having graciously honoured
this banquet with your presence. May I be permitted to add
the expression of my deep gratitude for the kind welcome I
have been given as well as for this evening's reception,
which is a worthy epilogue to the solemn gathering earlier
today at which I had the incomparable honour of receiving
the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1934 from the august
hands of His Majesty the King.
I also wish to express my profound respect and sincere
gratitude to the eminent Royal Swedish Academy for its
distinguished judgment, which crowns my long literary
career.
For the success of my literary endeavours, I had to go
to the school of life. That school, although useless to certain
brilliant minds, is the only thing that will help a mind of my
kind: attentive, concentrated, patient, truly childlike at first,
a docile pupil, if not of teachers, at least of life, a pupil who
would never abandon his complete faith and confidence in
the things he learned. This faith resides in the simplicity of
my basic nature. I felt the need to believe in the appearance
of life without the slightest reserve or doubt.
The constant attention and deep sincerity with which I
learned and pondered this lesson revealed humility, a love
and respect for life that were indispensable for the
assimilation of bitter disillusions, painful experiences,
frightful wounds, and all the mistakes of innocence that give
depth and value to our experiences. This education of the
mind, accomplished at great cost, allowed me to grow and,
at the same time, to remain myself.
As my true talents developed, they left me completely
incapable of life, as becomes a true artist, capable only of
thoughts and feelings; of thoughts because I felt, and of
feelings because I thought. In fact, under the illusion of
creating myself, I created only what I felt and was able to
believe.
I feel immense gratitude, joy, and pride at the thought
that this creation has been considered worthy of the
distinguished award you have bestowed on me.
I would gladly believe that this Prize was given not so
much to the virtuosity of a writer, which is always
negligible, but to the human sincerity of my work.
Luigi Pirandello. (1969). “Banquet Speech”. Nobel
Lectures, Literature 1901-1967. Horst Frenz, ed. Elsevier
Publishing Company, Amsterdam.
64
In 1925, at the end ofthis period, Pirandello had ready
a significantly revised edition of the play, introduced by a
preface originally published with the title “Come e perchè
ho scritto Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore' (“How and Why
I Wrote Six Characters”). Today the Preface must be
considered an integral part of the work, even though it is of
course not “performed” with the play itself. Its existence
and its strategic placement legitimate the inclusion in any
discussion of the play of a consideration of the author's
intention. It discloses this intention and from a formal point
of view it reveals something of Pirandello's habitually
complex and on the surface ambiguous tactics of
communication in which the techniques ofaggression and
suggestion are welded. By virtue of the Preface the play,
while remaining a play, takes on features of narrative,
foreshadowing a sub-genre of the novel which was to
become popular later, the romanzo-saggio (essay-like
novel) with its strong emphasis on the presentation of the
author's personal point of view. Indeed, Sei Personaggi is
equally well suited to being read or viewed. In the history
ofcritical reaction to it, its dual nature of work of literature
and work for the stage has repeatedly made it subject to the
dichotomies in judgment and evaluation that such a
distinction suggests.
“Every performance of a play, even by the same actors
represents a different realization of its possibilities, and no
single performance can fully realize all its possibilities”.
Thus in Elements of Drama (1971) Scholes and Klaus
formulate the principle which justifies a critic's interest in
what happens to a play after it is written, in its Fortleben.
No less important as documents for a fuller understanding
of a work are its pre-history, genesis, and early evolution, a
study of which represents the more familiar approach in
literary studies. In the case of Sei Personaggi, designated by
Pirandello himself commedia da farsi [a play to be
composed], the two approaches can be usefully joined.
They are reciprocally illuminating, not simply in terms of
one another (the play's Fortleben reflects back on its genesis
and forces the author to clarify his ideas and to make his
intentions more manifest), but for what they contribute to
the elucidation of the text itself, mastery of which in its
details must precede all attempts at interpretation and
evaluation.
Sei Personaggi was first mentioned in a letter by
Pirandello to his son, at the time a prisoner of war in
Austria, which was written on 23 July 1917: “Ma ho già la
testa piena di cose nuove! Tante novelle... E una stranezza
cosi triste, cosi triste: Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore:
romanzo da fare. Forse tu intendi. Sei personaggi, presi in
un dramma terribile, che mi vengono appresso, per esser
composti in un romanzo, un'ossessione, e io che non vogho
saperne, e io che dico che e' inutile e che non m'importa di
loro e che non m'importa piu di nulla, e loro che ins
mostrano tutte le loro piaghe e io che li caccio via...—e cosi
alla fine il romanzo da fare verrà fuori fatto” (Almanacco
letterano Bompiani, 1938) [But my head is already full of
so many new things! So many short stories... And a strange
thing, so sad, so very sad: Six Characters in Search of an
Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore
By Olga Ragusa
Sei Personaggi was first performed in Rome, 10 May
1921. Pirandello was in his fifties. He had behind him, as
we have seen, considerable literary activity. To his early
poems and essays, the 1904 success of the novel Ilfu Mattia
Pascal, and the publication of fifteen volumes of short
stories, had been added since 1917 the more and more
frequent composition and production of plays. “Il mio e'
stato un teatro di guerra”, he was to write in retrospect. “La
guerra ha rivelato a me stesso il teatro: quando le passioni si
scatenarono, quelle passioni io feci soffrire alle mie creature
sui palcoscenici” (in Quadrivio, 18 Nov. 1934). [Mine was
a war theatre. The War revealed the theatre to me. When
passions were let loose, I had my characters suffer those
passions on stage].
ln1921 Europe was still recovering from the effects of
war and revolution. The relatively stable political and social
world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
had been shattered, the map of Central Europe redrawn,
Russian exiles had fled to the West bringing with them their
characteristic artistic talent, Slavic intenseness, and
experience of theatre. ln Italy there was deep internal
turmoil soon to be calmed and controlled by the Fascist rise
to power. Many in the audience at that premiere of Sei
Personaggi no doubt shared with Pirandello the disorienting
experience of rapidly changing times which he, born in a
Sicilian backwater in 1867, epitomized in the image of
succeeding lights: “Perchè quattro generazioni di lumi”, a
minor character in Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio (Si gira...)
says, “quattro, olio, petrolio, gas e luce elettrica, nel giro di
sessant'anni, son troppe, sa? e ci si guasta la vista, e anche la
testa; anche la testa un poco” (TR, II, 609) [Because four
generations of lamps, oil, paraffin, gas, and electric light, in
the course of sixty years, that's too much, you know. It ruins
one's eyesight, and one's mind too. One's mind too, a little].
The early productions of Sei Personaggi made
theatrical history. As the play moved from Rome to Milan,
to London, New York, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, with stops
in many other cities along the way, its meaning became
progressively clarified in the interpretations of directors,
actors, and critics. Among a host of others, there were Dano
Niccoderni (the first director), Lamberto Picasso (who
directed the play later and also played the role of the
Father), G. B. Shaw (who insisted on its being performed in
London in spite of the strictures of the censor), Stark Young
(who reviewed it for the Ametican public), Benjamin
Crèmieux (who translated it into French), Georges Pitoeff
(who introduced a spectacular innovation in his 1923 Paris
production), Adriano Tilgher (whose 1922-3 articles on
Pirandello are said to have revealed Pirandello to himself),
and Max Reinhardt (whose German productions of
Pirandello did more than any others to bring out the
typically theatrical inhis art).
65
characters (“shadows in the shadow”) in a corner of his
room on the “long sultry summer afternoons” of 1915
shortly after Italy's entry into the War is none other than
Pirandello himself. Even closer to Sei personaggi than these
stories are two entries in Pirandello's notebooks, tentatively
and perhaps incorrectly dated 1910 or 1912. The first is a
narrative passage describing the feelings of a man of fifty
(not yet the play's Father, however) on his way to a certain
signora Pace's establishment. The second is a variation on
and an expansion of the passage from the letter to
Pirandello's son quoted earlier: the characters—the girl, the
mother, the son, the other children—have left their author
and have begun to act out the scenes of their novel before
him, the unhappy and complicated relationships hinted at
being already those which we shall come to know better in
the play later.
If we wish to cast our net wider and at the same time
begin to distinguish between the bodies of material which
we shall shortly describe as the three basic structural
elements in the play, there are a host of other sources or,
perhaps better, analogues to which we can turn. The Father
struggling to bend the chaotic and fluid stuff of life to his
reason has one of many antecedents in the irascible lawyer
Ciro Coppa who in II turno dies of a stroke while trying a
case. In his insight into the often woeful consequences of a
man's desire to do good, he echoes the sad and gentle judge
D'Andrea in La patente. In his single-minded drive to plead
his case, he is reminiscent of the wronged husband Ciampa
in Il berretto a sonagli, of Don Lolò, the stubborn plaintiff
in all possible lawsuits in Lagiara, ofsignor Ponza, the
harried small-town functionary in Cosi è (se vi pare)—
indeed, of all the raisonneurs that Pirandello defended with
a sensitive play on words in the afterword to Il fu Mattia
Pascal, added in the very year of Sei personaggi: “Mai
l'uomo tanto appassionatamente ragiona (o sragiona, che è
lo stesso) come quando sofire” (TR, I, 581) [never do men
reason as much (or are as irrational, which comes to the
same thing) as when they are unhappy]. There is almost no
end to the parallels that perceptive ingenuity can find
between the characters in different works of Pirandello. The
same holds true for recurrent patterns in the selection of
subject-matter. In this context, the relationships within a
family unit are certainly the most basic. And depending on
the degree to which we accept or are willing to work with
Freudian concepts an almost limitless number of
possibilities present themselves. The triangle which forms
the basis of the plot in La morsa, the consequences of a
triangle which provide the reason for the clash of interests
and wills in La ragione degli altri, the withdrawal of Leone
Gala from the life of his wife in Il giuoco delle parti (the
play not without reason being rehearsed when the six
Characters appear on stage), the two men who vie for the
affection of Agata Renni in II piacere dell’onestà—all these
complicated and abnormal deviations from the ideal of
nineteenth-century family life-provide a depth of reflecting
mirrors from which can be viewed the real-life situation of
the six Characters within the shaping imagination of
Pirandello.
Author: a novel to be composed. Maybe you understand.
Six characters, caught in a terrible drama, who come to me
to be formed into a novel, an obsession (of theirs), and I
want to have nothing to do with it, and I tell them it's
useless, that I don't care about them and that I don't care
about anything any more, and they show me all their sores,
and I chase them away... And so, in the end, the novel to be
composed will turn out composed].
The passage is of the greatest interest. It shows that
some of the basic elements of the work are already well in
place: the paradox of characters coming to importune an
author, the number of the characters involved, the “terrible”
nature of their predicament, Pirandello's own reaction to it,
his annoyance at their insistence enveloped in the feeling of
sadness released by their story and probably also by his own
helpless and at the same time essential relationship to them.
What is not yet fixed is the work's form: the persona of the
author has not yet divided itself into the characters of
Manager and Members of a company of actors, nor has the
setting become a stage, nor—to push the projection one step
further—has the stage itself been declared to be a metaphor,
the concretization of the space in the mind where the
creative act takes place. It is in this second area—in what
the 1917 letter does not include—that the development of
the work down to 1925 takes place. The other features (the
inner story of the Characters' lives and their desire for it to
be shaped and immortalized by art) had by 1917 an already
long and varied history in a number of Pirandello's other
works. Sei Personaggi, which is reported to have been
written in the feverish activity of three days and which
would be “rewritten” in the successive four years, was not
only to remain but had already been “in the making” for
some time.
How far back we place the origin of the idea for the
play depends on how comprehensive is the view we have in
general of the genesis of a work, to what distant recesses of
infancy and childhood experience we wish or are able to
trace it, and on how well we can or care to disentangle the
various strands that go to make up Pirandello's copious
production. In Pirandello's creative universe tout se tient
and there are no occasional pieces that are not also attached
to the centre. Even the literary journalism of his student
years, his book reviews, and his introductions to the works
of friends, contain expressions and remarks that are echoed
elsewhere in the major works and can serve to add depth to
our understanding.
Commonly cited as precedents of Sei Personaggi are
two short stories, La tragedia di un Personaggio (1911) and
Colloqui coi personaggi (1915). In both the first-person
narrator is a writer who speaks of his habit of granting
regularly scheduled interviews to the characters of his future
stories. La tragedia di un Personaggio, endowed as it is
with a fully fictional character, Dr. Fileno the eccentric
discoverer of “the philosophy of remoteness”, has become
one of Pirandello's best known stories. But Colloqui coi
personaggi is only rarely related to the play inasmuch as its
strong autobiographical slant has stood in the way of critical
success: its “author”, watching the gathering of nascent
66
There are other links between Sei Personaggi and
Pirandello's earlier as well as later works. They are
significant for other aspects of the play: the materialization
of characters as realtà create [created realities] rather thin
as the specific figures of the Six; and the dialectic tension
between narrative and drama, one facet of the discussions of
stage-craft that occur in the play. Illuminating for the first
are La tragedia di un personaggio and Colloqui coi
personaggi already mentioned. But more can be made of
the exploration of the nature of characters as distinct from
persons, a point that the Father in the course of his
encounter with Manager and Actors cannot let go of, so
important is it for a statement of his existential anguish (as
distinct from his need to justify his actions as a man). All
those works in which Pirandello deals with the supernatural
or the occult can be considered as precedents here. From his
ghost story La casa del Granella (and even further back
from his close friend and fellow writer Capuana's
fascination with similar manifestations) to the seances in
Ilfu Mattia Pascal and the apparitions of All'uscita—there
is a line of thought that culminates, as it were, in the comic
representation of the “materialization” of a character
(Bertoldo) in Act I of Enrico IV and in the impassioned
defence of the creative imagination by the magician Crotone
in I giganti della montagna. As far as the tension between
narrative and drama is concerned, the inevitable triumph of
drama is already foreshadowed in the 1899 essay L'azione
parlata in which, to signify the transition in ancient Greek
literature from epic narrative to tragedy, Pirandello quotes
Heine's famous ballad on the troubadour Geoffrey Rudel
and his lady Melisande: “Nel castello di Blaye tutte le notti
si sente un tremolio, uno scricchiollo, un sussurro: le figure
degli arazzi cominciano a un tratto a muoversi. Ii trovadore
e la dama scuotono le addormentate membra di fantasmi,
scendono dal muro e passeggiano Su e giu per la salá
(SPSV, 981) [Every night in the castle of Blay one can hear
strange noises, quivering, creaking, rustling: suddenly the
figures in the tapestries begin to move. The ghostly
troubadour and his lady flex their sleeping muscles, leap
from the wall, and walk through the halls].
What has been suggested so far is the usefulness, for a
work as complex and difficult as Sei personaggi, of an
approach that goes at least provisionally outside the text
itself But the question that remains to be asked is whether
Sei personaggi is actually a difficult work? Whether it has
deserved the half-century of exegesis which it has by now
behind it? And whether it continues to deserve and can
indeed withstand the close attention to which it is inevitably
subjected when chosen as a world classic and studied in
schools?
As is well known, the play caused a scandal at its
premiere. The Rome audience did not understand it,
affronted at finding the empty work-a-day stage displayed to
full public view when they entered, at being asked to
wimess the preparatory comings and goings of actors,
manager, property man, and prompter; annoyed at
Pirandello's intentionally provocative references to himself
right at the beginning, as an author who leaves actors,
critics, and audience forever dissatisfied with plays that no
one can understand and that are an insult to everyone
concerned. Nor were matters helped when the Characters
appeared, ushered in by the doorkeeper from the stage door:
“...Una strana tenuissima luce, appena percettibile, Si sará
fatta attorno a loro, come irradiata da essi: lieve respiro
della loro realtá fantasticá (SP, 12) [a strange, tenuous,
hardly perceptible light will have formed around them,
almost as if irradiated from them: the faint breath of their
imagined reality], Pirandello had written in the stage
directions. Given the stormy reception of every subsequent
action on stage (even after the performance an angry crowd
surrounded Pirandello as he was leaving the theatre,
continuing the rhythmic chanting of “Buf-fo-ne...Ma-ni-comió [Clown...To the madhouse] that had begun earlier), it
may be doubted whether this subtle touch, reminiscent of
the techniques of suggestion of the Symbolist theatre, had
the desired effect. The audience which had come to
abandon itself to the conventional creation of illusion on
stage (a tradition to which Pirandello's plays had adhered
hitherto) felt rebuffed by his attack on their expectations, by
his aggressive “demystification” of the stage. Thus what had
been no more than a habitually guarded reaction of public
and critics to Pirandello's disturbing themes was fanned into
open and vociferous rejection by this particular theatrical
aspect of Sei personaggi.
A comparison with what happened at the premiere of
Cosi' è (se vi pare) should bring this point home. The earlier
play, first performed in Milan on 17 June 1917, was
according to all reports a success. But in his review of it the
drama critic Renato Simoni astutely noted that the public's
warm reception went not to the ideas expressed by
Pirandello but to his extraordinary dramatic ability. “The
artist”, Simoni wrote, “won the battle that the philosopher
would have surely lost in the face of a crowd whom you
could never convince, as Professor Bergeret [protagonist of
Anatole France's Histoire contemporaine] used to say, that
Being does not involve substance but only expresses a
relationship.” Sei personaggi repeats Pirandello's
disconcerting ideas, those ideas later summarized in the
frequently quoted paragraph from the Preface: “Senza
volerlo, senza saperlo, nella ressa dell'animo esagitato,
ciascun d'essi, per difendersi dalle accuse dell'altro, esprime
come sua viva passione e suo tormento quelli che per tanti
anni sono stati i travagli del mio Spirito: l'inganno della
comprensione reciproca fondato irrimediabilmente sulla
vuota astrazione delle parole; la molteplice personalità
d'ognuno secondo tutte le possibilità d’essere che si trovano
in ciascuno di noi; e infine il tragico conflitto immanente tra
la vita che di continuo Si muove e cambia e la forma che la
fissa, immutabilé (MN, I, 60) [Without wanting to, without
being aware of it, in the struggle of their tormented souls,
each one of them (of the Characters) to defend himself
against the accusations of the others, expresses as his own
living passion and torment the pangs of spirit that for so
many years were mine: the deception of mutual
understanding founded on the empty abstraction of words,
the multiple personality of everyone corresponding to the
67
possibilities of being to be found in each of us, and finally
the inherent tragic conflict between life which is continually
moving and changing and form which fixes it, immutable].
In addition, by the alienating effect produced by the use of
the device of the play-within-the play Sei personaggi
undercuts the identification ofthe spectator with the
imitation of life taking place on stage. And finally, that
imitation itself fails to reach a completed shape, the playwithin-the-play breaks off, the six Characters being in the
end forced off the stage, authorless as they had come.
The difficulties of Sei personaggi, like those of Joyce's
Ulysses (the two works are exactly contemporary), are such
that they cannot be dispelled at one sitting. The education of
the public to innovations of magnitude takes time. Arnaldo
Frateili, who was present at the premiere, wrote as recently
as 1961 on the occasion of the International Congress of
Pirandello Studies: “Today everything that happens in Sei
personaggi appears to be obvious, clear, so normal that any
insignificant little director feels called upon to stage the
play, except that it then turns out that he hasn't understood
it at all and has misrepresented even those parts explicitly
described in the stage directions” (italics the present
writer's). Of course, much of the effect of the play, its inner
dynamics, rests on its ambiguities. But it is important to be
able to make a distinction between the ambiguities that
Pirandello wanted in the play and those that through
successive glosses he did his best to remove.
In contrast to the premiere, the second performance,
given by the same company in Milan, on 27 September
1921, ran smoothly. As Pirandello's recent biographer,
Gaspare Giudice, suggests, this may well have been because
the text of the play had meanwhile been published, thus
giving public and critics especially the critics—the
opportunity to become better acquainted with it. What
reading a play of Pirandello, as opposed to viewing it, can
add to one's understanding of it is revealed clearly in the
passage from the stage directions describing the Characters’
first entrance quoted earlier. Like Shaw's, Pirandello's stage
directions go far beyond the usual bare instructions
concerning actions, positions, entrances and exits, and
(touch upon matters that may be difficult if not impossible
to translate into the visual language of the stage. In the
instancejust referred to, they state something of crucial
importance to the play's basic siniation, that is, the
fundamental distinction in essence between Characters (with
a capital “C”) and persons. The Father's later verbal
explanation of this distinction is prepared for in this
passage, but it is a preparation that the audience at the
premiere had to do without.
That audience had to do without a number of other aids
that are available to readers today: I refer not to critical
studies of the play and its author, but to documents such as
reviews (which provide the most direct testimony to a play's
initial reception and hence its inherent strengths and
weaknesses), and more important still the recollections of
critics, directors, actors and friends who were close to
Pirandello when the play was originally written and
performed. Such, for instance, is the journalist Ono
Vergani's article, published at the time of Pirandello's death,
in which he remembers having been present in Pirandello's
study when the latter was at work on the second act of Sei
personaggi. Of similar interest, for the vividness with which
it records the impressions created by Pirandello's first
reading of the play to a group of friends in Rome, is
Frateili's introduction to a recent reprinting of the review
which he had published in the Rome daily L'idea nazionale
the morning after the premiere. And Dano Niccodemi,
director of that performance, wrote of the rehearsals that led
up to it and of Pirandello's untiring patience with actors who
had in his view been completely corrupted by their reliance
on the prompter (an inveterate custom on the Italian stage in
his day).
For our purpose the value of these documents lies not in
their incidental contributions to Pirandello's biography but
in the light they throw on the interpretation of the play.
Variously emphasized are the depth and intensity of
Pirandello's involvement with his characters (on an
anecdotal level this distinctive psychological trait appears in
the 1919 story Il pipistrello), the eminently “spoken” style
of his dramatic language, and the urgency that he constantly
felt to explain the nature and polemical intention ofhis play.
Frateili reports that those who heard Pirandello read Sei
personaggi at a gathering at Frateili's home in the early
Spring of 1921 were overwhelmed, “not only because of its
aggressive originality but also because of the passion he put
into the reading, a different passion and a different voice for
each character.” Niccodemi shows him listening intently to
the recitation of the actors, his lips silently forming each
word as it was spoken, his face reflecting the expression of
each of the actors in turn: “Each muscle is in movement. His
mouth, running the gamut of all possibilities of expression,
becomes countless mouths. His face reminds one of a crowd
of faces in action”. And the letter that Pirandello himself
wrote to Ruggero Ruggeri in 1936, when the great actor was
about to play the role of the Father in a new production,
shows how little he was satisfied even after fifteen years of
successful performances that his play had actually been
understood: “Vorrei che questa nuova edizione attuasse
interamente, o almeno nel miglior modo possibile, la
visione che ho avuto del lavoro, quando l'ho scritto.
Bisognerà evitare l'errore che si è sempre commesso, di far
apparire i personaggi come ombre e fantasmi, anzich è
come entità superiori e più potenti, perch è “realtà create”,
forme d'arte fissate per sempre e immutabili, quasi statue, di
fronte alla mobile naturalità mutevole e quasi fluida degli
attori' [I would want this production to carry out completely,
or at least as far as possible, the vision I had of the work
when I wrote it. One must avoid the error that has always
been made of making the Characters appear as shadows and
phantasms, instead of as superior and more powerful entities
by virtue of their being “created realities”, art forms fixed
forever and immutable, almost statues, in face of the mobile
and almost fluid naturalness of the actors (italics the present
writer's)].
Multifacetedness (poliedricità), wrote Lampedusa, is the
distinguishing characteristic of works of absolute first rank.
68
Because Sei personaggi possesses this quality and presents
different aspects of itself to different viewers, I judge it a
work difficult enough to require exegesis and rich enough to
withstand it. Of the three bodies of material that for
purposes of analysis can be seen as constituting distinct
structural elements in the play—(1) the story of the
Characters' lives, (2) the attempt on the part of Manager and
Actors to turn this story into a play, and (3) Pirandello's
own telling of the story within his representation of the
Company's attempt to give it shape—it is the first that in
early productions attracted the greatest share of attention
and that continues to awaken a good deal of perplexity even
today. An inveterate habit of mind demands an answer to
the question. “What exactly did happen?” and conceives of
the question as referring to Father, Mother, and their
offspring, rather than to that odd group of beings who one
day appeared on a stage set for a rehearsal Only after a
satisfactory answer has been given can the reader or viewer
go on to consider and appreciate other aspects of the work
before him.
The story of the Characters as it unfolds on stage begins
in good epic fashion in medias res or, if more properly
dramatic terminology is preferred, close to its denouement.
The Father is in his fifties; the Son is twenty-two. This is the
first chronological fact given: it is spelled out in the stage
directions and made visually apparent in performance
through make-up and the assignment of parts. Chronology
appears again when twice in rapid succession the
Stepdaughter says that she has been an orphan for two
months and that for that length of time she, the Mother, and
her siblings have been wearing mourning for her father. The
Stepdaughter's father is not the Father, whose only child is
the Son. The blood relationship of the Six, by normal
standards confusing, could not be more explicitly stated
than it is in the very first few minutes of the play. But
Manager and Actors, already disconcerted by the Father's
initial presentation of himself as a character (while they see
him as a person), are further bewildered by this intricate
family relationship. Their questions, quips, and remarks,
however, serve to elicit a full clarification of the facts.
These facts must be fully established to satisfy the
natural curiosity of the audience in the hall and 0£ the other
audience, Manager and Actors, on stage. They are moreover
the facts that explain the particular intensity of the feelings
of Father, Stepdaughter, and Mother (the only three of the
Six who speak at first), an intensity which keeps the
Characters more tightly enclosed within their relationship
than the Members of the company are united by their
community of shared work and professional pride.
The emotions displayed by the Characters have been
building up over a long period of time. They are emotions
typical of the long, intimate, and ambivalent association that
characterizes family life. Their intensity can also be
measured by the fact that Stepdaughter and Father, in
different degrees and for different reasons, have lost their
sense of shame and reserve. Secrets normally shielded by
the bourgeois family are here pulled into full public view.
The Step-daughter especially is driven by a ferocious fury
to unmask the Father's motives in taking the family back
home with him; and in her vindictive grudge against him,
however justified, she does not hesitate to reveal her own
degradation at the hands of Madame Pace, the brothel
keeper. It is significant that the scene she cannot wait to act
is judged damaging to her reputation by both the Mother
and the Manager, the two guardians of propriety in the play.
As for the Father, the life-time of isolation he has behind
him has obliterated his sense of self-awareness to the point
that he permits himself to be dragged into performing the
very scene (his meeting with the Step-daughter at Madame
Pace's) he should have every reason to want to keep hidden.
His need to justify his actions, especially his original
decision about the Mother, has been pent up so long that it
now sweeps all restraints before it. The Son's contempt both
for the Father's empty phrases and the Stepdaughter's
vilification, his refusal to have anything to do with the
others (so that he even rejects his Mother), his complete
withdrawal—a reaction to hurt just like the Stepdaughter's
aggressive pushing forward—all these are the results of
long pent-up resentments.
To know what the Characters' relationship is and for
how long their association has lasted is not however
sufficient to form a judgment. That a judgment is being
asked for is obvious: the Father, not the Stepdaughter, finds
himself in a symbolic court of law and it is he who presents
the evidence for his defence. The evidence forms the
retrospective exposition of the story. The Manager sits
down to listen to it and the Father begins it in the imperfect,
the de rigueur tense for background information in
historical narrative: C'era con me un pover'uomo...” (MN, I,
88) [There was a poor devil of a man working for me...].
The Father, who was married to a woman of humble
background, mother of a child that for its health had been
sent to a wet nurse in the country, noticed the mutual
sympathy that developed between his employee (the
pover'uomo) and his wife, the support they sought in one
another for putting up with his irascibility. Finding the
situation intolerable—not because of jealousy, he says, but
because the drawing together of the two implied a tacit
criticism of his very being—the Father fired the man. The
Mother remained at home, a lost soul, “come una di quelle
bestie senza padrone, che si raccolgono per carita” [like an
animal without a master that one takes pity on and carries
home]. Not out of cruelty, the Father says, (just as it had not
been out of cruelty that he sent the Son away) “quanto per la
pena—una pena angosciosa—che provavo per lei” [as
because of the pain—a veritable anguish—that I felt on her
account]) he sent the Mother to join the other man, better
suited than he was to live in harmonious unity with her. But
as such stories go, what has been intended to correct
circumstances actually complicated them. Upon his return
home, the Son felt estranged and no bond developed
between him and his father. As for the Father, he describes
himself too as wandering through the empty rooms “come
una mosca senza capo” [like a fly without a head].
It is thus that the Father in his loneliness began to take
an interest in the Mother's new family, particularly the
69
ad andarsene...” (MN, I, 97) [But he won't be a nuisance for
long. Nor will the little girl, no, for she's the first to go...].
Obviously Pirandello was convinced that the facts of the
story as recounted in Act I of the definitive version of the
play (the text we have been following in our own
reconstruction) were sufficiently explicit for the spectator to
grasp. This explains why he felt that he could excise from
the original version the part of the Father's long speech that
followed the sentence just quoted. In those lines the Father
had given an interpretation of the denouement: the very
interpretation which forms the basis of Eric Bentley's
“Father's Day” (from a Freudian point of view one of the
best pieces written not on Pirandello's play but on the inner
story which it tells). Through the ending, says the Father,
the original family is reconstituted, Father, Mother, and Son
“resi, dalla scomparsa di quella famiglia estranea, estranei
anche noi l'uno all'altro, in una desolazione mortale, che e'
la vendetta...del Demone dell'Esperimento che e' in me...”
(SP, 53) [ourselves alienated from each other by the
disappearance of that alien family, alienated and utterly
desolated—he revenge of the Demon of Experiment that I
carry inside me].
The second recurrent structural element in Sei
personaggi consists of the repeated efforts of Manager and
Actors to create the illusion of reality on stage with the
“real” reality which the Characters bring, them. In contrast
to the Six, who are tragic if for no other reason than because
they feel their predicament, Manager and Actors are comic.
Like characters of comedy in general they may be described
as believing in what they can touch, see, and understand and
eager to preserve their sense of dignity. They may he seen
as working out their problems on the level of action rather
than abstract thought, as being strictly empirical. Whenever
attention shifts to them there is a resultant change in tone.
The audience identifies with them in their patronizing
humouring and more often intolerant rebuffing of the
Characters, in what Hobbes calls the “sudden glory” of
abruptly perceiving one's superiority to others. But because
of the play's dynamic movement the identification does not
hold. The language of the Characters, especially that of the
Father, the furthest removed in its specious (the word is
Pirandello's) ratiocination, is again and again the more
powerful one and repeatedly engulfs and drowns out the
more trivial language of the Actors.
This situation is similar to that in Cosi'é (se vi pare),
Manager and Actors taking the place of the small town
gossips who in that play are the uncomprehending
spectators of the anguished, harrowed family in their midst.
The parallel, however, does not of course imply identity.
Signora Frola and the Ponzas are persons not characters; the
Agazzis, Sirellis, and the others are ordinary citizens not
actors. The setting is a middle-class apartment not a stage.
Laudisi, though like the Father the spokesman for typically
Pirandellian ideas that recur in all the writer's works, is not
the Father. Yet the pattern of the one play fits into that of
the other, and the audience that identifies at first with the
outer group ends up, if the lesson of the parable has been
successfully imparted, discovering its oneness with the
Stepdaughter, who had reached school age and whom he
could watch on her way to and from school. Of the other
children the Boy was still too young to go to school and the
Little Girl (who is four to the Stepdaughter's eighteen when
they appear on stage) had not yet been born. Some time
after the Father had become interested in the Mother's new
family, they moved away and remained away for a number
of years. Then, upon the other man's death, they came back
to the city and it was at that time that the encounter at
Madame Pace's took place. Horrified to see what poverty
had done to his wife and her children, the Father took them
back into his home. The Son resented the intrusion of the
strangers, his mother's bastard children, and though he had
no affection for his father, was antagonized by the
Stepdaughter's insulting behaviour towards him. The
Mother, rejected by her Son, could think of nothing but of
winning back his love. The Boy, like his own father “umile”
[humble] (as the Father repeats), was completely lost in the
new environment, and indeed ended up by committing
suicide. Before that happened, however, the Little Girl,
neglected by the Mother in the same way as the Boy was,
drowned in the garden fountain. As a result of this
accumulation of tragedies the Stepdaughter left home.
These facts, which constitute the entire story (as distinct
from specific episodes) of the six Characters' lives, all
emerge in the course of Act I though not in this order and
not as schematically summarized. They are surrounded and
engulfed by the emotional reactions of all concerned and
their motivations are variously played out, interpreted by
those who were affected. But the denouement, the finale of
the drama to be made, is already clearly hinted at by the
Stepdaughter in her initial appeal to Manager and Actors.
“Senta, per favore”, she pleads with the Manager, “ce lo
faccia rappresentar subito, questo dramma, perchè vedrà
che a un certo punto, io—quando quest'a—morino qua [the
Little Girl]—vede com'è bellina? cara! cara! ebbene,
quando quest'amorino qua, Dio la toglierà d'improvviso a
quella povera madre: e quest'imbecillino qua [the Boy] farà
la piu' grossa delle corbellerie, proprio da quello stupido
che è - allora vedrà che io prenderò il volo! Sissignore
prenderò il volo! il volo!' (MN, I, 82-3) [Just listen: let us
play it for you right now, this drama, for at a certain point
you'll see that I—when this little darling—look how sweet
she is! Sweetie! Sweetie!—well, when God will suddenly
take this darling away from that poor mother of hers, and
that little idiot there will do the stupidest of things, like the
nitwit he is—then you will see me getting out! Yes sir!
Getting out! Out!].
Reproduced without the accompanying stage directions
and read without being able to see the gestures and actions,
the Stepdaughter's words with their broken syntax, the
interruptions and resumptions, reflect in miniature the
process by which the facts of the story are revealed. These
facts are repeated, with the exception of the Stepdaughter's
flight, at the end of the act when in answer to the Manager's
comment that children are a nuisance on stage the Father
reassures him: “Oh, ma lui [the Boy] glielo levasubito,
'l'impaccio, sa! E anche quella bambina, che e' anzi la prima
70
inner. The epithet pazzo [mad] used by the Manager to
brand the Father and his family when they appear on stage
is also the pivot for the action of Cosi'é (se vi pare).
R.J.Dorius has said, “Comedy justifies, defends, or elevates
us in relation to the oddity, the alien, the scapegoat. It
enables us to surmount our doubts about those that are
different by laughing them out of existence”. This is the
mechanism that tries to function in Cosi'é (se vi pare) but
which Laudisi interferes with and the inner group itself
succeeds in deactivating. It is also the mechanism that
Manager and Actors instinctively have recourse to every
time the Father soars too high in asserting his uniqueness.
We shall see when we turn to the third recurrent
structural element in Sei personaggi that as potential
characters Father and Stepdaughter are thoroughly
acquainted with the experience of literary creation. As nonauthors, Manager and Actors have no first-hand knowledge
of that experience and. as non-characters, they are ignorant
of the particular anguish of a transitional state of existence
between non-being and being that Father and Step-daughter
experience and express. But as members of the theatrical
company they are well versed in the techniques of stagecraft, and their long association with the life of the theatre
has acquainted them at least superficially with most of the
theoretical notions that have had currency in the history of
drama. (Pirandello's own equally empincally derived
knowledge in this area constitutes the core of his
Introduction to Silvio D'Amico's 1936 edition of Storia del
teatro italiano, an expanded version of an article that had
appeared the previous year in the review Scenario). The
stage business constantly interrupts the Characters' efforts at
telling, or rather, portraying their story, thus providing a
commentary perceived immediately as comic by the
audience. In their totality the incidental observations that
accompany it lay down the “rules” that the inner episodic,
unfinished play, which remains a fragment, should have
followed.
The play begins with an unset stage: the directions,
calling for a raised curtain, no wings or scenery, and a stage
almost completely dark and empty, have remained
unchanged in successive editions of the play. The
Company's very first action shows the audience the
expertise of its technical staff, from stage manager (a
character added in the 1925 edition) to stage crew.
Immediately following but still prior to the entrance of the
Characters, Manager and Actors prepare themselves for the
rehearsal of a play. It happens to be a play by Pirandello,
the same author who is responsible for having gathered
together the audience in the theatre, and this fact provides a
particularly lively and pointed context within which some
stage conventions can be quickly sketched. The introductory
scene can thus be seen as a frame for the whole play,
underlining its specific genre of play- within-a-play.
Reflecting Pirandello's characteristic use of repetition
and complication by way of repetition, the first part of Act
II, up to the appearance of Madame Pace, reproduces with a
greater abundance of details the business of setting up a
play already gone through in Act I. But whereas in that
instance there already was a text of the play and the
Manager's task was therefore limited (he explained the
author's intentions and because of the particular play being
rehearsed tried to overcome his Company's resistance to the
“incomprehensible” Pirandello), in Act II more is at stake.
Here there is no written play and consequently everything,
including the assignment of parts, the selection of props, the
application of make-up, as well as the meaning of the
author, remains to be settled and thus becomes the subject
of prolonged and heated argument between the Characters,
and the Manager and Actors. By Act III some of the friction
has gone, some of the stage conventions have been
accepted. As a result, the curtain rises on at least part of the
shadow setting (simulacro di scena are Pirandello's words)
already in place: a small garden fountain is seen where
previously Madame Pace's famous parlour had been erected
piece by piece before the eyes of the audience. Other props
are added in the course of the first part of the act, in another
repetition, this time on a reduced scale, of what had
occurred in Acts I and II.
We can now ask what kind of play Manager and Actors
have in mind as the vehicle for the raw material of the
Characters' lives. It comes as no surprise that in terms of
both dramatury and stage practice, Manger and Actors are
traditionalists. Like the audience in the theatre they feel that
art must give a recognizable structure to reality, that it must
reduce chaos to order.
A first distinction is made by the Manager when he
enunciates the basic characteristic of drama: on stage there
is action, event, not narration. “Ma tutto questo e' racconto,
signori miei!” (MN, 1,91) [But all this is story telling, my
friends!], he exclaims interrupting the Stepdaughter's
recollection of the Father waiting for her at school when she
was a child. A little earlier the Stepdaughter, shouting down
the Father, had raised the same objection: “Qui non si narra!
Qui non si narra!” (MN, I, 87) [This is no place for
storytelling!]. (For Pirandello speaking in his own voice on
this point, see L'azione parlata: “Ogni sostegno descrittivo
o narrativo dovrebbe essere abolito su la scena” (SP, 981)
[All descriptive and narrative props should be banished
from the stage].) At the end of Act I the Actors, who up to
that point have been little else than spectators vis-à-vis the
entanglements of Characters and Manager, in a brief excited
choral scene give its technical name to the kind of play that
seems to be in the making: commedia del'arte, the
improvised drama gone out of fashion two centuries before
and to which they would not deign to stoop. Thus the act
that had begun with the reading of stage directions from a
script ends symmetrically with the reiteration that, on the
stage of Sei personaggi, written—that is, fully structured—
plays are performed, not plays for which only a rudimentary
sketch exists. As far as dramaturgy is concerned, the most
important point made regarding the kind ofplay the
Company is accustomed to performing and the audience to
viewing is the Manager's enunciation of the rule of unity of
action or coherence. “Ma io vogho rappresentare il mio
dramma! Il mio!” (MN, I, 119) [But I want to play my
drama. Mine!], the Stepdaughter cries passionately in Act II
71
“played” by the two Characters. Within the world of Sei
personaggi this becomes a rehearsal of a rehearsal, in its
turn even further distanced from the audience when the
Manager gets up on stage to show his actors how it should
be played.
Pirandello's stage directions at this point (they are
already in the original edition) call for a scene that is not a
parody of the one just performed but one that might be
described as a clean, corrected copy of it, the artful
imitation of reality. The Manager demands ease, souplesse,
in the acting. But the performances delivered are wooden,
exaggerated, conventional. For the Characters they are a
torture to watch (though the Step-daughter's sense of
alienation is expressed paradoxically in frenzied peals of
laughter). For the audience in the hall they are irresistibly
funny, caricatures. But for the Manager and Actors they are
exactly what they expect them to be, not yet perfectly timed,
still capable of being improved, but essentially correct. The
Leading Man is playing “un vecchio, che viene in una casa
equivoca...con l'aria spigliata, sbarazzina d'un vecchio
galante” (MN, I, 114) [an old man who enters a house of ill
repute... with the self-possessed roguish air of an elder Don
Juan]. The Leading Lady plays a world-weary prostitute
“socchiudendo penosamente, come per disgusto, gli occhi.”
(MN, I, 116) [closing her eyes painfully as though in
disgust]. What in the original “performance” of Father and
Step-daughter were words and gestures indissolubly united
in genuine psychological reactions, in the Actors’
interpretation become so many discrete and separate
samples of emotions, for each one of which there is a set
and predetermined tone, a studied and practiced posture.
Obviously, in the eyes of the Manager and Actors, the
Characters are types not persons, interchangeable with the
cast of stock characters the Company excels at playing. This
fact provides an ironic retrospective comment on the
Manager's boast in Act I that his Company has given life to
immortal works “qua, su queste tavole” (MN, 1,79) [here,
on these boards], and earlier in Act II that his actors have
given “corpo e figura, voce e gesto” (MN, I, 104) [body and
face, voice and gesture], that is expression, to much loftier
subject-matter than the paltry story that the Characters have
brought him. The scene almost seems to have been written
to illustrate the reasons for Pirandello's well-known
reservations about the theatre as an art form (an excellent
comprehensive statement, particularly relevant to this aspect
of Sei personaggi, is the 1908 essay Illustratori, attori, e
traduttori), or to support the Stepdaughter's conjecture in
Act III that their author had rejected the Characters because
of his discouragement with the theatre as it was usually
made available to the public at that time.
We could perhaps step back for a moment and try to cast
the action of the inner story of Sei personaggi, the story that
tells the content of the Characters' lives, into the mould of
the traditional three-act play. The differences between the
first and definitive versions of the play indicate that
Pirandello must have done something like that at some
point, must have passed, that is, from what the ancient
theories of rhetoric called inventio to dispositio, or from
in the course of her tug-of-war with the Father. The
Manager's answer runs the whole gamut from annoyance to
persuasion to conciliation. There is not only the
Stepdaughter's drama, he says, but the drama of the others
as well. One character cannot simply take over the stage for
himself and crowd out the others: “Bisogna contener tutti in
un quadro armonico e rappresentar quel che e'
rappresentabile!” (MN, I, 119) [Everyone must be placed
within the frame of one harmonious whole. Only what is
performable can be performed]. And after all, he concludes,
it will be in the Stepdaughter's own interest to play down
her drama at this particular juncture in the story if she
wishes to win greater audience sympathy.
Beyond these theoretical desiderata—a play is action not
narrative; it must be written down not improvised; it must
have unity—there is the whole area of dramatic practice.
Unity, for instance, may be achieved through unity of place
but it can equally well be achieved by starting the action
with an event already far along in the development of the
situation. The problem of unity of place appears in Act III
apropos the Stepdaughter's observation that not all of the
second act of the proposed drama can be set in the garden
because the events that concern the Son and the Boy
actually took place in the house. The problem of the
relationship between preceding action (antefatto) and
dramatic action appears in Act I when the Father agrees that
the narrative part of the Characters' lives will not be
represented but only referred to. And in fact the three acts
of the drama to be composed focus on three scenes that took
place at the end ofthe story to be told: the Father meets the
Stepdaughter when she is a fully grown young lady and not
when she is a child; the children will play the scene of their
death and not moments of their life with their own father;
Mother and Son will come together at the moment of their
reunion and not at their separation ten years earlier. As we
have already pointed out in connection with the story of the
six Characters, the action on stage is the epilogue of a
situation created much earlier. In this respect Sei
personaggi repeats the pattern of Pirandello's earliest extant
play, La morsa (1892), whose original title was L'epilogo.
Problems of acting or interpretation are furthest
removed from the area of theory and are most central to
practice. In Sei personaggi they are dealt with directly in
Act II and their presence there contributes to making that
act the busiest, most animated, varied and colourful of the
play. Friction between the Characters and the Actors starts
early in the act when the Manager assigns their roles to the
Members of the Company. It is significant that he should
find no difficulty in doing so, while the Father and the Stepdaughter find it impossible to recognize themselves in the
Actors that will play them. Even with the best make-up, the
Father observes, the Leading Man will hardly resemble him,
and as for playing him as he really “is” that is obviously an
impossibility. The Step-daughter, for her part, simply laughs
in the Leading Lady's face. Yet a little later, immediately
after the scene with Madame Pace and the meeting between
Father and Stepdaughter, Leading Lady and Leading Man
take the initiative and propose to rehearse the scene just
72
what Alfieri called ideare to stendere, from the “thinking
up” of the subject to its arrangement into scenes. We have
already noted that there are three scenes into which what
would otherwise be the narration ofthe Characters' story isto
be absorbed: the meeting between Stepdaughter and Father,
the death of the children, and the Mother's pleading of her
case with the Son. Of these only the first one, the encounter
at Madama Pace's, is set off in the text, explicitly labeled
“The Scene”, and played through in its entirety. The second
one is set up by the Manager, but though its denouement
(the revolver shot with which the Boy kills himself) takes
place, it is not actually played. The reason for this is that it
intersects what should have become the third scene, which
to suit modern stage conventions is first transferred from
inside the house (where it reputedly took place) to the
garden and is then violently rejected by the Son who claims
that it never took place because he walked out on his
Mother — in a play on words — “Proprio per non fare una
scena!” (MN, I, 136) [precisely in order not to make a
scene]. Under normal circumstances these three scenes
could have turned into the necessary three acts. As it is, they
are out of phase from the beginning, “The Scene” being
played in Act II, the second act of the play-to-be-made
being announced at the beginning of Act III (why the whole
adventure in the theatre which Sei personaggi describes
should have begun with the rehearsal of Act II of another
play now becomes apparent in retrospect), and the third act
never being even begun. That something like this outline
must at some time have occurred to Pirandello can be
deduced from the displacement of the second scene from
the beginning of Act II (where it was in the original version)
to Act III. The only scholar who has so far compared the
different editions of the play, Jorn Moestrup, attributes the
displacement to Pirandello's desire to maintain suspense by
avoiding foreknowledge. This explanation, if not perhaps
actually incorrect, is certainly insufficient. We have already
shown how the story of the six Characters is revealed in its
entirety in Act I. It would seem more likely therefore that
the second scene was moved to Act III not only because it is
the conventional tragic climax but also because there was no
place for it in Act ii, the act reserved for “The Scene”.
We come now to the third body of material that can be
isolated as a distinct structural element in the play: the
discussions of the peculiar state of being of a character and,
subsidiary to that, the consequences for the author that
result from it. In those parts of Sei personaggi that
dramatize the problematic interplay of characters and
actors, it is the character's strong personal traits, his unique
individuality, the fact that he is someone (“Perché un
personaggio ha veramente una vita sua, segnata di caratteri
suoi, per cui é sempre ‘qualcuno’. Mentre un...un uomo cosi
in genere, può non esser ‘nessuno’” (MN, I, 126) [Because a
character really has a life ofhis own, marked with his special
characteristics; for which reason he is always “somebody”.
But a man... a man in general, may very well be “nobody”],
says the Father in Act III), that may stand in the way of his
being adequately represented by an actor professionally
trained but incapable of “that supreme renunciation of self”,
that “spiritual creative activity of the rarest kind”, which
Pirandello speaks of as the mark of the great actor in his
essay on Eleonora Duse (The Century Magazine, June
1924). In the other parts, those that deal with the
relationship of characters and author, it is the character's
need for untrammelled development that may find itself in
conflict with the shaping imagination of the author. And
indeed in speaking of the creative moment elsewhere in his
work Pirandello returns over and over again to his basic
claim that no worthwhile work of art can be produced, no
living and breathing character be given life unless the author
“Si sia veramente immedesimato con la sua creatura fuao a
sentirla com'essa Si sente, a volerla com'essa Si vuole” [has
really become identified with his creature to the point of
feeling it as it feels itself, of wanting it to be as it wants
itself to be] (L'azione parlata, spsv, 982).
It was pointed out earlier that the paradoxical situation
of characters coming to importune an author was fixed from
the beginning of Pirandello's conception of the work. This
paradox gives the play its title and is its most striking
invention as well as its structural keystone. It calls for
attention. Obviously, characters are not persons. It is true
that in familiar discourse the word “character” may be used
as a synonym for “person”, specifically, “a person who is
peculiar and eccentric.” But when the word occurs in
conjunction with the concept of authorship, it is removed
from the everyday world to the world of fiction. In that
context characters are distinguished from persons, the
former being creations of authors, the latter products of
procreation and environment. A character should not
normally be thought of as having a life outside the work of
which he is a part, nor of existing prior to the creative act of
his author.
Yet Pirandello felt, as we have seen in the 1917 letter to
his son and in the two short stories mentioned earlier, that
he was “visited” by his characters by some more insistently
than others—before they had a place in the man-made world
of art. Being “visited” by a character, a figment of the
imagination, means that a particularly close relationship
exists between the author and the character, not necessarily
in the sense of an autobiographical identification but in the
sense of the “archaic image” as described by Jung: “the
image...presents itselfmore or less suddenly to the
consciousness as the latter's product, similarly to a vision or
a hallucination, but without the pathological character of
these”. Other writers besides Pirandello have described the
phenomenon, but none, as far as I know, has made as much
of it as he. Chekhov, for instance, is reported to have
remarked: “There is a regular army of people in my brain
begging to be summoned forth, and only waiting for the
word to be given”. Ibsen wrote: “Often my characters
astonish me by doing or saying things I had not expected yes, they can sometimes turn my original scheme upside
down, the devils!” Dickens confessed: “My notion is always
that, when I have made the people to play out the play, it is,
as it were, their business to do it and not mine”. That many
writers felt the characters in their works to be more alive
than the persons of flesh and blood that surrounded them in
73
their daily lives is borne out by Balzac's feeling that through
his novels he was contributing to the citizenry of France.
But if we examine these instances in the light of Pirandello's
more complex statements, we note that it is not so much the
autonomy of the character that astonishes Pirandello as the
demand the character makes on him and that he must
answer with an act of love. The rejected character, the
character without an author, is the one that has been denied
this kind of love. Pirandello's immedesimarsi, the author’s
identification with his creature “to the point of feeling it as
it feels itself, of wanting itto be as it wants itselfto be”, is
quite different from the identity of sensations felt by Mme
Bovary and Flaubert when, as is reported, he had the taste
of arsenic in his mouth as he was describing her death. As
for Flaubert's frequently quoted remark, “Mme Bovary c'est
moi”, I would interpret it as meaning that he understood
Emma through himself, that he lent her something of
himself, in contrast to Pirandello's understanding his
characters by listening to their “reasons”, by foregoing some
of his own ego for their sakes.
The basic situation of Sei personaggi, then, is a
variation on a theme familiar to Pirandello and not unknown
to other writers. The variation means that contrary to what is
the case for Dr. Fileno, for instance, the Six in the play
encounter not an author but the Manager and his actors. If
the invention of having characters act as though they were
persons, with the spontaneity of the undetermined, is
paradoxical, then when these characters-turned-persons are
forced to become actors(even if only in a rehearsal),
something fundamental happens in the history of the theatre.
Actors and characters as different entities cannot
simultaneously occupy the same stage. Characters are
essences; actors are roles. The creation of illusion on stage
demands that the actors become the characters for the
duration of the performance. In Pirandello’s play, the
Characters are in the end forced off the stage. There is no
room for them in that particular space which is the space
reserved for actors, that is, for persons who have studied
and learned the parts they are to play. The Characters have
“lived” their parts, each one his own part, each one in his
own incommunicable experience of it. The parts have not
been orchestrated; they make little sense as a whole. Instead
of a story there will be fragments of a story. Instead of a
resolution there will be the empty stage at the end. The
audience that in accordance with a well-established custom
has come to abandon itself to the conventional creation of
illusion will go home unsatisfied, its expectations frustrated.
Catharsis has not taken place, and the experience of the play
is replaced by heated discussions, not as in normal aftertheatre conversations of its performance, but of its very
meaning. (For Pirandello’s own dramatically detailed
reconstruction of audience reaction to his works, see the
First Choral Interlude of Ciascuno a suo modo and
especially the lines spoken by One of the Author's
Champions.)
In the Preface to Sei personaggi Pirandello wrote what
is surely one of the most lucid and comprehensive analyses
of the play. One passage ssummarizes what happened once
he, in the persona of the author, decided to let loose on
stage the Characters, who had so to speak served their
acting apprenticeship in trying to get him to write their
story: “è avvenuto naturalmente quel che doveva avvenire:
un misto di tragico e di comico, di fantastico e di realistico,
in una situazione umoristica affatto nuova e quanto mai
complessa; un dramma che da s è per mezzo dei suoi
personaggi, spiranti parlanti semoventi, che lo portano e lo
soffrono in loro stessi, vuole a ogni costo trovare il modo
d'esser rappresentato; e la commedia del vano tentativo di
questa realizzazione scenica improvvisa” (MN, I, 60) [what
had to happen happened, and the result was a mixture of
tragic and comic, of fantastic and realistic, in a completely
new and extremely complex humoristic situation: a drama
that seeks at all costs to represent itself by means of its
characters, breathing, speaking, self-propelling, who carry it
within them and suffer it; and the comedy ofthe vain
attempt, at this sudden theatrical realization]. It should
come as no surprise that Pirandello's answer to 'what
happened' once he set the play- within-the-play, or better the
drama-within-a-comedy, in motion refers not to the first of
the linked terms but to the second, not to the substance or
plot of the inner story but to the shaping of the work, the
artifact created by the outer story. In choosing as the genre
designation for his play the expression commedia dafare
[comedy to be composed], which we read on the title page
of the 192J edition and which fits perfectly into the mould
romanzo da frre used to refer to the work initially,
Pirandello underlined his awareness of the comparative
importance of its two indissolubly joined halves.
We have had occasion more than once to point to La
tragedia di un personaggio as in many ways indispensable
for a proper and satisfying understanding of Sei personaggi.
But the strong analogies between the two works do not, of
course, obliterate the differences. Thus, while Dr. Fileno
and the Father are both in search of an author, Dr. Fileno is
already a character while the Father is seeking to become
one. If as a character in La tragedia di un personaggio Dr.
Fileno is at least twice removed from being a person, the
Father's status is as yet problematic. He finds himself in a
no man's land, in transition to a place for which he longs—a
kind of Paradise of Essence—and which he may never
reach. Indeed, is he a character or is he only one of the
Characters? The difference in the meaning of the word
brought about by its capitalization deserves attention. For
the Father (as are the other five, but not Madame Pace) is
nameless, just as the protagonist of Enrico IV is nameless,
his identity in the void of the ellipsis points which appear in
that play's dramatis personae:.. (Enrico IV).
In order to acquire a name the Father would have to
convince an author that he should be given one. But the
only author the Father has met so far is the one who, as we
have seen, left some fragments of a projected novel, in
which the gentleman on his way to signora Pace's cannot
actually yet be said to be the Father. As for the author of the
Preface, he did not encourage the fictional realization of the
Six; he blocked it. “Siamo qua in cerca d'autore' (MN, I, 77)
[We are here looking for an author], the Father says as he
74
leads his little band up to the stage. But on the stage of Sei
personaggi there are no authors, and the Father will have to
plead his case before what are at best humble craftsmen. In
La tragedia di un personaggio Dr. Fileno, already in the
privileged state of being really a character, had been luckier.
The fact that it is craftsmen and not an author that the
Father will be addressing makes all the difference. The
variation on the theme—the lucky find made by the author
of the Preface to rid himself of the characters he didn't want
to coddle, didn't want to give fictional life to—has farreaching formal results. The encounter becomes a sequence
of misunderstandings. Between Dr. Fileno and his author
there were no misunderstandings. The author knew what
was wanted of him; he knew how much of himself he would
have had to give to satisfy the character; by an act of
judgment he refused to become involved. Not so the
Manager and his Company of actors. They are seduced,
willing to help. They listen and watch. They comment and
analyze. They imitate. They question. But they are unable to
help. Potential creators with the unfashioned raw material
which the Characters bring them of what the magician (i.e.,
a kind of author) in I giganti della montagna calls
“fictitious reality” (MN, II, 1362), they cannot rise to the
challenge, imprisoned as they are in material reality.
Three times, once in each act, the Father comes forward
to try to explain what the nature of the Characters is. Each
time the explanation is interrupted. The Characters and the
Actors cannot understand the Father. When in Act I he asks
“Non è loro ufficio dar vita sulla scena a personaggi
fantastici?” (MN 1, 78) [Isn’t it your job to give life to
creatures of fantasy on stage?] the Manager interprets the
question as a slur on the actor's profession. “Ma io la prego
di credere che la professione del comico, caro signore, e
una nobilissima professione!” (MN, I, 74) [But I beg of you!
The actor's profession is a very noble one], he counters
indignantly.
When in Act II Madame Pace miraculously appears at
the very moment she is needed, the Father is radiant but the
Manager is again indignant, “Ma che trucchi son questi?”
[What kind of tricks are these?], and the Actors echo him:
“Ma doye siamo insomma?” [What goes on around here?],
“Di dove e' comparsa quella 1i?” [Where on earth did she
come from?], “Questo e' il giuoco dei bussolotti!” (MN, I,
107-108) [Hocus pocus!]. The Father's exhortation (“Ma
scusino! Perché vogliono guastare, in nome d'una vetità
volgare, di fatto, questo prodigio di una realtà che nasce,
evocata, attratta, formata dalla stessa scena, e che ha più
diritto di viver qui, che loro; perchè assai più vera di loro?”
(MN, I, 108) [But pardon me! Why would you want to
destroy in the name of a vulgar, factual truth, this miracle of
a reality which is born, called forth, attracted and formed by
the stage itself and which indeed has more right to live here
than you because it is much truer than you?]), would fall on
completely deaf ears if the scene between the stepdaughter
and Madame Pace which has immediately come to life were
not so compelling—so “natural”—that Manager and Actors
are momentarily rapt in it (incidentally, an illustration of the
aptness of Simoni's distinction between the success of the
artist and the failure of the philosopher, referred to earlier).
But the truce, in spite of this magnificent demonstration of
both what a character is and what literary creation is, is
short-lived. From the realm of art, Manager and Actors
quickly fall back into the shop-talk of their trade.
Act III contains the Father's longest and most complex
gloss on the condition of being a character. It begins with
the Manager's taunt, “E dica per giunta che lei, con codesta
commedia che viene a rappresentarmi qua, è più vero e
reale di me!” (MN, I, 126) [And you'll be saying next that
you, with this comedy of yours that you brought here to act,
are more true and more real than I am!]. And it continues as
the Father, following the lead shown by Dr. Fileno and
repeating parts of his defense verbatim, calls upon the
experience of literary creation to explain his point. In
underlining the close link between author and character—a
link made even closer by his addressing an author already
singled out as potentially receptive to his plea—Dr. Fileno
had begun his defense with the words: “Nessuno puo sapere
meglio di lei, che noi siamo esseri...” (NA, I, 717) [No one
can know better than you that we are beings...]. Between
Father and Company of actors, on the other hand, there is
no common ground of experience and so the Father's speech
begins: “Non l'ha mai visto, signore [i.e., he has never seen
a character getting out of his part and philosophizing about
himself], perchè gli autori nascondono di solito il travaglio
della loro creazione” (MN, I, 127) [You have never seen
such a case, sir, because authors, as a rule, hide the labour
of their creation]. There follows a recapitulation of the
genetic moment in a character's life, until the Father's
abstract, verbal presentation is replaced by the scene which
the Stepdaughter, stepping forward in a dreamlike trance,
plays out. She enacts, in other words, the temptation scene
barely hinted at in the second fragment of the novel
mentioned earlier (“Soprattutto lei, la ragazza. La vedo
entrare...” (SPSV, 1217) [She especially, the girl. I see her
coming in...]), described with greater pathos and wonder in
Colloqui coi personaggi (“Nell'ombra che veniva lenta e
stanca...” (NA, II, 1131) [In the darkness that gathered slow
and tired...]), and related specifically, in the Preface, to
Pirandello's decision to turn novel into play.
The Father's three passages stand out within the
overall structure of the play and form one thematic unit
within its strategy. When the theme re-emerges in the last
act, the Manager's mocking lines contain the same two
adjectives, vero and reale, that the Father had used in Act I.
Actors, he had said, give life to “esseri vivi, pm vivi di
quelli che respirano e vestono panni! Meno reali, forse; ma
più veri!” (MN, 1,79) [living beings more alive than those
who breathe and wear clothes: beings less real perhaps, but
more true!]. In the linking and at the same time separation
of vero and reale there lie, quite incidentally and curiously
embedded, echoes of the history of the development of a
literary concept—realism, naturalism, or what in Italy was
known as verismo—by the 1920's completely surpassed in
the work of Pirandello. The importance of Sei personaggi in
the literature of the twentieth century derives also from the
statement of the non-mimetic function of art so insistently
75
repeated in its exploration of the relationship between
character and author.
In analyzing the dramatization of the inner story of the
Characters' lives and the interplay of characters and actors
on stage, we spoke briefly of some of the changes that took
place in the text between the original and definitive
versions. These changes consist of excisions, additions, and
transpositions, and concern all three aspects of the play. In
addition to the Father's speech toward the end of Act I,
Pirandello dropped the important lines of the Son in Act II
in which the latter rebelled against the Father's forcing upon
his children a recognition of their parents' needs as man and
woman (SP, 64); an exchange between Father and Manager
at the beginning of Act III in which the Father reiterates
Pirandello's conviction that men reason because they suffer
(SP, 121-3); and by transposing the beginning of Act II to
Act III, the attempt at a scene between Mother and Son. But
of considerably greater significance are the additions which
radically change the beginning and the ending of the play.
Instead of the Manager's lines with which the play originally
ended: “Finzione! Realta! Andate al diavolo tutti quanti!
Non mi é mai capitato ana cosa simile! E mi hanno fatto
perdere ana giomata!” (SP, 141) [Pretence? Reality? To hell
with it all! Never in my life has such a thing happened to
me. I've lost a whole day over these people, a whole day!],
there is now a pantomime which changes the resolution of
the story—the reconstitution of the original family and the
departure of the Stepdaughter—into visual terms and
emphasizes for the last time the radical, essential,
metaphysical distinction between the Characters and the
Actors. The beginning of the play is correspondingly more
elaborate: the “frame” has been expanded. The addition of
the Stage Manager with his liaison function serves to break
up into its components the realistic rendition of theatrical
life on stage and thus to spell it out in its particulars. No
doubt reflecting Pirandello's increased familiarity with the
practices in the theatre, the stage directions in the later
version also pay greater attention to lighting effects.
But the most important innovations are the two
stairways, left and right respectively, that connect the stage
with the auditorium. The stairways did not exist in the
original version, which was written for a typical proscenium
stage, like the one of the Teatro Valle at the time with a
framed playing area strictly separated from the audience.
Thus while the Actors continue to enter from the back of the
stage, the Manager now uses one of the two stairways. He is
dressed in street clothes, and his progress from the
auditorium door down the aisle and up the stairway is
watched by the Actors. As a matter of fact, in order to
attract attention to the unusualness of the proceedings, the
Actors are made to interrupt the dance they had just begun.
The entrance of the Characters who in the original
version had used the door on stage now repeats and
amplifies that of the Manager. Like him they come up from
the auditorium, preceded by the Stage-Door Man, but
Manager and Actors will become aware of their presence
only at the end of their walk down the aisle. When the
Father says the words, “Siamo qua in cerca d'un autore”,
with which the action proper begins, he is standing at the
foot of one of the stairways. He will be preceded by the
Stepdaughter who in her first demonstration of
aggressiveness and insubordination pushes him aside as he
has just barely begun to speak. The Father then follows the
Stepdaughter up the steps; the Mother, the Little Girl and
the Boy remaining on the lowest level, the Son hanging
back, still on the auditorium floor. This tableau is held as
the dialogue between Father and Manager engages the
emotional reactions of the Actors in an initial skirmish.
With the Father's lines: “Mi dispiace che ridano cosi, perchè
portiamo in noi, ripeto un dramma doloroso, come lor
signori possono argomentare da questa donna vestita di
nero” [I'm sorry to hear you laugh, because, I repeat, we
carry a painful drama within us, as you all might deduce
from the sight of that lady there, veiled in black] identical
words in the two editions, with the exception of the addition
of doloroso in the later one), attention shifts to the
Characters again. The Father helps the Mother up the
remaining steps, and a new tableau—the Mother, the Little
Girl and the Boy close together, the Son standing to one
side at the back, the Stepdaughter also standing apart from
the others, downstage, leaning against the proscenium
arch—is formed on one side of the stage. This action, in
which there is no dialogue, is accompanied by a play of
lights which serves to divide the stage in two, creating the
same kind of distance between Characters and Actors that
already exists by virtue of the stage itself between spectators
and performance. At the end of the action the Actors
applaud, thus underlining the theatrical nature of what has
just occurred: among other things the Father is an
accomplished director whose gifts are recognized by the
professionals before whom they have been displayed.
The stairway will not be used by the Characters again
until the very end of the play when the Stepdaughter runs
down it for her spectacular exit. In Act II its role is that of
simple passageway from stage to auditorium floor, used by
the Manager (as he had already used it in Act I) in his
frequent moves from and to the stage as he observes the
effectiveness of “The Scene” being enacted. The difference
in essence between Madame Pace and the Characters is
stressed by the fact that she does not use the stairway but
enters from the back of the stage as she had done in the
original version. Her sudden appearance, however, greeted
in the original version by no more than deep amazement and
indignation on the part of Manager and Actors, sets off a
lively by-play in the definitive version as they rush off the
stage with a yell of terror, running down the stairs and
starting up the aisle as though fleeing. In Act III the stairs
are twice on the verge of being used by the Characters. The
first time is when the Son tries to walk out on the scene with
the Mother but is held back within the acting space on
stage: his trance-like walk from stairway to stairway is
watched with fascinated awe by the Actors. The second time
is during the violent flare-up between father and son as the
Father grabs the Son and shakes him only to be grabbed in
turn. Then in an escalation of hatred and rebellion—in the
definitive version as against the earlier one—the Son throws
76
the Father to the ground next to the stairway. Again
attention is directed to this architectural feature which in the
strategy of communication of Sei personaggi acts at once
as link and barrier.
Of the changes we have been reviewing, the excisions
(whose main function is to add to the antefatto which it is
up to spectator or reader to reconstruct) and the
transposition of material from Act II to III (which results in
a better articulation of the compositional elements of the
plot) stem from “literary” rather than “theatrical”
considerations. They could conceivably have occurred even
if Sei personaggi had never been performed and if in the
years between 1921 and 1925 Pirandello had not increased
his personal involvement in the production of his plays to
the point of desiring and planning his own company and
theatre, the Teatro d'Arte, which opened its doors in Rome
at the beginning of April 1925.
The new conception of acting space, however, and the
suggested use of masks—the other major innovation in the
definitive version—are no doubt to be attributed to
Pirandello's contacts with milieus in which discussions of
theatre architecture were the order of the day and with
productions of Sei personaggi whose actors and director
had not been briefed and rehearsed directly by him. One of
the most famous new theatres of the time was the Berlin
Komodie, built by Oskar Kaufmann for Max Reinhardt in
1924, with loges opening directly on to the stage to
facilitate that union of audience and performers already
called for in the 1915 Manifesto del teatro futurista
sintetico. Virgilio Marchi, the architect who rebuilt the
theatre of the Palazzo Odescalchi for Pirandello's company,
was himself a Futurist and he, too (as demonstrated by the
setting and staging of Sagra del Signore della nave, the
one-act play with which the theatre was inaugurated), was
concerned with breaking down the traditional separation of
auditorium and stage. As far as Pirandello's experience of
Sei personaggi in the interpretation of other directors is
concerned, the most important was that afforded by his first
trip to Paris in April 1923. At the Comédie des Champs
Elysées he witnessed the entrance of the Six Characters not
from the door on stage as his directions called for but, as
“invented” by Georges Pitoëff lowered from above by
means of an old freight elevator with which that stage
happened to be equipped. Alarmed by this departure from
his conception when he had first heard of it in
correspondence with Pitoëff, Pirandello was so taken by it
when he saw it enacted that he adopted it, according to one
report, for a later performance under his own direction (see,
Jean Hort, La Vie héroique des Pitoëff Geneva 1966,
p.178). Of similar significance, though Pirandello was not
present at any of its performances, was the Max Reinhardt
production of Sei personaggi which ran at the Komodie
from 30 December 1924 till 8 March 1925. Max Reinhardt's
Characters made their entrance neither from the stage door,
nor from the auditorium door, nor from above, but were on
stage from the beginning, hidden from the audience until a
violet light made them appear out of the darkness like
“apparitions” or ghosts.
It is probably impossible fifty years after the event to
go back and pinpoint the exact cue from which Pirandello
derived the double means (stair and masks) by which to
underline in truly spectacular and theatrical fashion the
play's fundamental donnée: the difference in essence
between characters and persons, and the accompanying
superiority of art (not artifice) to life. This aspect of the
play, which constitutes its uniqueness in Pirandello's
dramatic corpus, was obscured when in 1933 he joined Sei
personaggi to Ciascuno a suo modo and Questa sera si
recita a soggetto to form the first volume of his collected
plays. Seen as one of the trilogy of the theatre-within-thetheatre, Sei personaggi does indeed illustrate one fact of the
interaction of characters, actors, author, manager or
director, drama critics, and spectators which should result in
the creation of the illusion of life on the stage. In the
Preface, however, which “completes” the play, and was
indeed written well before Questa sera Si recita a soggetto
(though not before Ciascuno a suo modo), the emphasis was
elsewhere.
As portrayed in the Preface, Sei personaggi is not
primarily (as it appears in the Premise to the trilogy) the
representation of the conflict between characters and actors
and manager taking place in the theatre but the
representation of the author's creative act which takes place
in the mind and is externalized (or concretized and
“personified”) through the medium of the stage. Such is the
meaning, Pirandello says explicitly, of the sudden
appearance of a seventh Character, Madama Pace, who does
not arrive in the theatre with the others but “materializes”
when the action calls for her presence: “É avvenuta una
spezzatura, un improvviso mutamento del piano di realtà
della scena, perchè un personaggio puo nascere a quel modo
soltanto nella fantasia del poeta, non certo sulle tavole d'un
palcoscenico. Senza che nessuno se ne sia accorto, ho
cambiato di colpo la scena: la ho riaccolta in quel momento
nella mia fantasia pur non togliendola di sotto gli occhi agli
spettatori; ho cioè mostrato ad essi, in luogo del
palcoscenico, la mia fantasia in atto di creare, sotto specie
di quel palcoscenico stesso” (MN, I, 66) [A break occurred,
a sudden change in the level of reality of the scene, for a
character can be born in this way only in the poet's
imagination, not on a stage. Without anyone having noticed
it, I all of a sudden changed the scene: I gathered it up again
into my own imagination without, however, removing it
from before the eyes of the spectators. That is, I showed
them, instead of the stage, my imagination in the act of
creating—my imagination in the form of this same stage].
The full implications of this important passage so
necessary to a total understanding of the play are easily
overlooked in the thematic richness ofthe Preface which
recapitulates the history ofthe genesis of the play and offers
a probing analysis of its constituent elements. But the
dominant chord is actually sounded at once with the
introduction at the begiuning of the Preface of yet another
“character”, Pirandello's unconventional little servant maid,
Fantasia, the fleshed-out image of the writer's creative
faculty. In his fictionalized retelling of the historical facts
77
which we have used in this chapter to throw light on the
making of the “comedy to be composed”, Pirandello is
concerned with what in I giganti della montagna Cotrone
refers to as “the real miracle”: “E il miracolo vero non sarà
mai la rappresentazione, creda, sarà sempre la fantasia del
poeta in cui quei personaggi son nati, vi....”, (MN, II, 1362)
[And the real miracle will never be the representation itself,
but always the fantasy of the poet in which those characters
were born living...]. In Pirandello's conception fantasy, or
better, imagination, is a life-giving force similar to nature in
its overwhelming drive to creation. Metaphors of birth,
gestation, survival, and death recur time and again in his
remarks on the psychology of literary invention. Indeed,
nowhere has the organic metaphor, so deeply embedded in
the aesthetics of Romanticism, been developed as fully as in
the work of Pirandello. In the midst of a totally pessimistic
view of life which cannot remove its gaze from the
inevitability of death, Pirandello has triumphantly affirmed
the immortality of the work of art: “Tutto ciò che vive, per il
fatto che vive, ha forma, e per ciò stesso deve morire: tranne
l'opera d'arte, che appunto vive sempre, in quanto è forma”
(MN, I, 66) [All that lives, by the fact itself that it lives, has
form, and for that very reason must die; except the work of
art, which lives forever precisely because it is form].
Because of the importance of this aspect of
Pirandello's thought and because the text of Sei personaggi
and its becoming are full illustration of it, my discussion of
the play has assumed its present form.
Olga Ragusa. (1980). “Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore.”
Pirandello: An Approach to His Theatre. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
78
men.” He delighted in creating an unusual but logistical
situation—developing it seemingly illogically—and by
continually tossing the coin until both sides had been clearly
revealed, managing to convince his audience that his
unconventional and not very credible treatment was in fact
wholly logical and convincing.
Many of his plays were written in the style known to
the Italians as “grottesco”: comedies developed tragically or
tragedies developed comically. Nearly all spring from
intensely dramatic situations—situations in which passion,
love and tragedy make their presence strongly felt.
In England theatre productions of his works have been
few and far between, and this may be due partly to the fact
that producers and actors, when faced with a play of his,
sometimes assume: ‘he is going to be far too difficult for the
audience so it will be up to us to put that right!’ By
approaching the text with the preconceived notion that a
particular interpretation must shine like a beacon between
author and audience in order to elucidate matters, one often
succeeds merely in confusing the issue further. There have
been examples of this author’s brilliantly cynical humour,
behind whose mask we are meant to see our own selves,
being deliberately distorted to the level of unacceptable
farce in an attempt to “clarify”.
If Pirandello’s plays were approached more simply,
were permitted to play themselves more, and did not have
the Latin sentiment and human compassion ironed out by
their interpreters, perhaps the fear that one may not be able
to follow him would be removed from the minds of many of
our theatregoers. It would be found that his comedies, as
Kenneth Tynan wrote: “wear their fifty-odd years as if they
were swaddling clothes”, and his works might then find
themselves a niche in our commercial theatre.
In presenting the complete dramatic works of Luigi
Pirandello, we have attempted to hold to the line of
simplicity in translation, avoiding the temptation of so many
adaptors to reconstruct the author’s statements in the light in
which they themselves see them. Many translations offered
to us have been by people with little or no knowledge of
Italian, who have relied on a commissioned literal
translation which they have rephrased in their own style.
This is a method which should be severely frowned upon.
Pirandello’s plays often leave the audience with an
uneasy feeling that the situation is not concluded and that
we have not wholly understood all we have seen. We feel
the need to discuss the play and search for the real truth
among the various aspects of it which have been depicted
for us.
In many of his plays, events do not take place before
our eyes: they have already occurred before the rise of the
curtain. It is as though we are aware of an immutable past
awaiting judgment...it weighs on the minds of the characters
in the drama and they cannot abandon or dismiss it. They
are caught up in a “prison of fact”. As Leone Gala says in
The Rules of the Game: “When a fact has happened, it
stands there, like a prison, shutting you in.”
Pirandello seems determined never to allow his
audience to be satisfied. For him, the spectators are no inert
Introduction
By Robert Rietty
Surprisingly little seems to be known in England about
Luigi Pirandello who died in 1936, and of whom The Times
said: ‘It is largely to him that the theatre owes its liberation,
for good or ill, from what Desmond MacCarthy called “the
inevitable limitations of the modern drama, the falsifications
which result from cramming scenes into acts and tying
incidents down to times and places.” Only a few of his
major works have been published in English to date and as a
result there is a tendency to classify Pirandello as a purely
intellectual writer, prone to “cerebral gymnastics” and most
difficult for an actor to interpret. Those who find him so
might first study a little the life of the man and in so doing
they may reach a better understanding of Pirandello the
dramatist.
Pirandello was born at Caos in Sicily in 1867. He
studied letters at Palermo University and later in Rome. For
many years he taught at a girls’ school, living in
comparative poverty and growing steadily unhappier in his
work. His marriage ended in disaster when his wife became
mentally unbalanced and had to be sent to a mental
institution. His literary efforts began with poems, short
stories and later he wrote novels; he did not start writing
seriously for the theatre until 1915 at the age of forty-eight,
after which he gave to the stage no fewer than forty-three
plays in Italian and several in Sicilian.
For a number of years he was in charge of his own
theatrical company, which had as its leaders Ruggero
Ruggeri and Marta Abba, and many of his plays were
written as tailor-made articles for them and for the rest of
his group. Despite the severe lack of finance, he never
succumbed to writing plays which conformed to the style
and idiom of the more successful dramatists of his time. He
deliberately created anti-heroes. His protagonists are like
“soldiers who have been beaten in their first battle and have
no belief in the future!”
Having lost a considerable sum of money with his own
company, and become greatly disillusioned because his
native Italy considered him ‘too original for the box office”,
(often his plays were translated and performed abroad long
before they saw the footlights in their own language) and
already almost seventy, Pirandello suddenly announced that
Europe had grown too old for him, that it could boast of
only one other young brain (Bernard Shaw), and that he
would take himself off to a country of new ideas—and then
journeyed to America.
Pirandello was a fiery, passionate man who had
reached his own particular outlook on life through adversity
and years of tortured wondering at the true significance of
reality. His primary concern was with the illusions and selfdeceptions of mankind and the nature of identity. His works
grew—as Eric Bentley points out—“from his own torment,
and through his genius they came to speak for all the
tormented and potentially to all the tormented, that is, to all
79
mass which revives and becomes articulate only after the
curtain has fallen. No—they have to be awakened, shaken
up and agitated while in their seats and made to become
involved with the actors. The auditorium is to be part of the
stage and the listener to take part in the discussion; to be
filled with doubt and uncertainty.
Pirandello constantly reverses the coin, revolves the
situation. He never intervenes to clarify: “the enigma must
remain an enigma, and at the end there is to be no
conclusion, rather a question mark.” As Giovanni Macchia,
an eminent authority on the maestro, says: “it is impossible
to love Pirandello, but then the destiny of all artistes today
is not to make themselves loved, but to be oppressed and
tortured. And among the tortured, the spectator is not to be
spared.” As to his protagonists, they are not tragic heroes,
but miserable sad objects worthy only of pity, derision or
commiseration.
Clothe the Naked (Vestire Gli Ignudi) appeared in
1922. Ersilia Drei, in order to escape from a dreary
existence, creates a fiction, only to find that the imaginary
self she has conjured up is wrenched from her by the world
of reality and she is left—as it were—naked. In typically
Pirandellian fashion the subdued atmosphere of the bare
room in which the bachelor Lodovico lives and the
contrasting noises from the Street play an important role in
the drama, symbolising the conflict in Ersilia’s mind. In the
maestro’s own words: “Ersilja tries to create for herself,
even in her attempted suicide, a beautiful mask to cover up
her sad reality, but life has tricked her and destroyed the
mask.”
All for the Best (Tutto Per Bene) appeared in 1920.
Like so many of Pirandello’s dramas it was first conceived
as a short story and was published in a volume entitled La
Vita Nuda (Naked Life). In this play, the protagonist
Martino Lori has lived a delusion for years, believing his
deceased wife to have been a model of love and fidelity—
only to discover that his daughter is actually the child of her
affair with a well-known Scientist to whom the girl appears
to show more affection than to Lori. When he suddenly sees
himself in the mirror, as it were, through the eyes of others,
he realises that he is the only one to have been unaware of
the true situation and that the mirror reflects back not the
familiar image he has long been used to, but a deformed one
like in the distorting mirrors of a fun fair.
Limes from Sicily (Lumie di Sicilia) was also
conceived as a short story and published in a volume of
Novelle under the title “Quando Ero Matto” (When I was
Mad) in 1902. It was the first play he ever produced and
lacked the psychological gymnastics of his more serious
writing. It is a simple tale, simply and movingly told and
typifies the sense of nostalgia common to Sicilians far from
their native soil.
Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei
Personaggi in Cerca d’Autore) also began life as a short
story entitled “The Tragedy of a Character” in the collection
published as La Trappola. It is the most popular and
probably the most performed of all Pirandello’s plays. So
much has been written about the play that the best
introduction is surely his own.
For a great many years now, though it seems no time
at all, I have been assisted in my artistic labours by a
sprightly young helpmate, whose work remains as fresh
today as when she first entered my service.
Her name is Imagination.
There is something malicious and subversive about
her, as her preference for dressing in black might suggest,
indeed, her style is generally felt to be bizarre What people
are less ready to believe is that in everything she does there
is a seriousness of purpose and an unvarying method She
delves into her pocket and brings out a jester’s jingling cap,
rams it onto her flaming coxcomb of a head and is gone She
is off to somewhere different every day Her great delight is
to search out the world’s unhappiest people and to bnng
them home for me to turn into stories and novels and plays;
men, women and children who have got themselves into
every conceivable kind of fix, whose plans have miscarried
and whose hopes have been betrayed; people in fact, who
are often very disturbing to deal with.
Well, some years ago, this assistant, this Imagination
of mine, had the regrettable inspiration, or it could have
been the ill-fated whim, to bring to my door an entire
family; where or how she got hold of them I have no idea,
but she reckoned that their story would furnish me with a
subject for a magnificent novel.
I found myself confronted by a man of about fifty,
wearing a dark jacket and light trousers, grim-visaged, with
a look of irritability and humiliation in his eyes. With him
was a poor woman in widow’s weeds holding two children
by the hand, a four-year old girl on one side and a boy of
not much more than ten on the other. Next came a rather
loud and immodest young woman, also in black, which in
her case contrived to look vulgarly dressy and suggestive.
She was a-quiver with a brittle, biting anger, clearly directed
against the mortified old man and against a youth of about
twenty who stood detached from the others, wrapped up in
himself, apparently contemptuous of the whole party. So
here they were, the Six Characters, just as they appear on
the stage at the beginning of the play. And they set about
telling me the whole sad series of events, partly in turns, but
often speaking all together, cutting in on each other,
shouting each other down. They yelled their explanations at
me, flung their unruly passions in my face, just as they do in
the play with the luckless Producer.
Can any author ever explain how or why a character
came to be born in his imagination? The mystery of artistic
creation is the mystery of birth itself. A woman in love may
desire to become a mother; but this desire by itself, however
intense, will not make her one. One fine day she finds she is
to be a mother, but she has no precise indication of when
this came about. In the same way an artist, as he lives, takes
into himself numerous germs of life, and he, too, is
completely unable to say how or why at a given moment
one of these vital germs gets lodged in his imagination to
become in just the same way a living creature, though on a
80
higher plane of life, above the vicissitudes of everyday
existence.
I can only say that, having in no way searched them
out, I found myself confronted by six living, palpable,
audibly breathing human beings: the same six characters
you now see upon the stage. They stood before me waiting,
each one nursing his own particular torment, bound together
by the mode of their birth and the intertwining of their
fortunes, waiting for me to usher them into the world of art
and make of their persons, their passions and their
adventures a novel or drama, or at least a short story.
They had been born alive and they were asking to live.
Now I have to explain that for me as a writer it has
never been enough to portray a man or a woman, however
individual or exceptional, just for the sake of portraying
them; happy or sad, I cannot just tell a story for the sake of
telling it or describe a landscape simply as a creative
exercise.
There are writers, quite a lot of writers, who like doing
this. It satisfies them, and they ask no more. They are by
nature what one might properly term historical writers. But
others go further. They feel a deep-seated inward urge to
concern themselves only with persons, happenings or scenes
which are permeated with what one might call a particular
sense of life and so with some sort of universal significance.
These, properly, are philosophical writers.
I have the misfortune to belong to this second
category.
I detest the kind of symbolic art where all spontaneous
movement is suppressed and where the representation is
reduced to mechanistic allegory; it is self-defeating and
misleading; once a work is given an allegorical slant you are
as good as saying that it is only to be taken as a fairy-tale; in
itself it contains no factual or imaginative truth; it is simply
there to demonstrate some sort of moral truth. This kind of
allegorical symbolism will never answer the innermost need
of the philosophical writer, apart from certain occasions
where a fine irony is intended, as in Ariosto for instance.
Allegorical symbolism springs from conceptual thought; it
is concept, recreated as image, or striving to recreate itself
as image. The philosophical writer, on the other hand, is
looking for value and meaning in the image itself, while
allowing the image to retain its independent validity and
artistic wholeness.
Now, however hard I tried! simply could not find this
kind of meaning in the six characters. Consequently I
decided there was no point in bringing them to life.
I kept thinking: I have given my readers enough
trouble with all my hundreds of stories; why heap more
trouble upon them with the sad story of this unhappy lot?
And so thinking! put them out of my mind. Or rather, I
made every effort to do so.
But one does not give birth to a character for nothing.
Creatures of my mind, those six were already living a life
which was their own and mine no longer, a life I was no
longer in a position to refuse them.
And so it was, that while I went on grimly determined
to expunge them from my consciousness, they, who by now
had almost completely broken free of their narrative
context, fictional characters magically transported outside
the pages of a book, were carrying on with their own lives.
They would pick on certain moments of my day to appear
before me in the solitude of my study, and one by one, or
two at a time, they would try to entice me, suggesting
various scenes I might write or describe and how to get the
best out of them, or pointing out unusual aspects of their
story which people might find particularly novel or
interesting; and so it went on.
Each time, for a moment, I would let myself be won
over; and whenever I relented a little they would draw
strength from my weakness and come back with fresh
arguments and I would find myself near to being convinced.
And so, as it became increasingly difficult for me to get rid
of them, their task of tempting me became increasingly
easy. There came a point where they had become a positive
obsession. Then suddenly I hit on a way out.
Why not write a play, I thought, based on the
unprecedented case of an author who refuses to allow a
certain set of characters to live, and the plight of these
characters who, being fully alive in his imagination, cannot
reconcile themselves to being excluded from the world of
art? They have already detached themselves from me; they
have their own life; they have acquired speech and
movement; .by their own efforts, by struggling against me
for their lives, they have emerged as fully-fledged dramatic
characters, autonomous and articulate. They already see
themselves as such; they have learnt to defend themselves
against me; they are capable of defending themselves
against anyone. Well then, why not let them go where
dramatic characters usually go to live: put them on a stage.
And see what happens.
And that is what I did. And what came out of it was an
inevitable hotchpotch of tragedy, comedy, fantasy and
realism in a completely original, and extraordinarily
complex humours situation: that of a drama willing itself to
be staged, determined at all costs to find a means of
expression in the autonomous, living, speaking characters
who embody it and suffer it in their inmost selves; and of
the comedy resulting from the abortive effort at improvised
theatrical realization. The surprise, first of all, on the part of
the wretched company of actors, engaged in a day-time
rehearsal of a play on a stage stripped bare of flats and
scenery; surprise and blank incredulity on being faced by
the six who introduce themselves as characters in search of
an author and then this instinctive quickening of interest
when the Mother in her black veil suddenly collapses in a
faint and they get a glimpse of the drama encompassed by
her and the other members of this extraordinary family, a
dark ambiguous drama which comes crashing unannounced
onto an empty stage in no way prepared to receive it and
then the gradual intensification of their interest as the
conflicting passions explode in turn, the Father’s, then the
Stepdaughter’s, the Son’s, and the poor Mother’s; passions,
as! say, which vie to do each other down with a tragic
lacerating fury.
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And here it is, the universal meaning previously
sought in vain in my six characters They have found it, by
going onto the stage by themselves they have uncovered it
in themselves, in the frenzy of the desperate battle waged
by. each one against the others, and by all of them against
the Producer and actors who do not understand them.
Unintentionally, inadvertently, each one of them,
defending himself in a state of considerable mental agitation
against the recriminations of the others, shows himself to be
tormented by the same fierce Sources of suffering that have
racked my own spirit for years: the delusion of reciprocal
understanding hopelessly based on the hollow abstraction of
words; the multiple nature of every human Personality,
given all the possible ways of being inherent in each one of
us; and finally the tragic built-in conflict between evermoving, ever-changing life, and the immutability of form
which fixes it.
The six characters give the impression of being on
different planes, as if they were not all realised to the same
degree. This is not just because some have leading roles and
others have supporting ones; that would be a basic matter of
the structural perspective proper to any narrative or
dramatic work. Nor, given their purpose can they be said to
be incompletely formed. All six are at the same point of
artistic realization; all six are on the same plane of reality,
the imaginative plane on which my play is set. But the
Father, the Stepdaughter and even the Son are realised as
Mind or Spirit; the Mother is realised as Nature; and the last
two are realised as ‘presences’: the Boy who is an onlooker
butfor his single gesture, and the completely static Little
Girl. This places the characters in a new perspective. An
instinctive prompting had told me I must make some of
them appear to be more fully realised artistically and others
less so; others, again, were to be represented by the barest
outline; there, simply, as part of what happens in the story.
The most alive, the most fully realised, are the Father and
the Stepdaughter; these two are the natural leaders who
dominate the play, dragging along behind them the
Practically dead weight of the others: the demurring Son,
the submissive suffering Mother, and on either side of her
the two children who consist of little more than their
appearance and have to be led by the hand.
This was the point. They had to appear at the exact
stage of development each had reached in the author’s
imagination at the moment when he decided to be rid of
them.
Thinking back on it now it seems little short of a
miracle that I intuitively sensed the necessity for this,
blindly hit on the solution with my new perspective, and
actually made it work. And indeed the play was conceived
quite literally in one of those flashes of imaginative
illumination when all the elements of the spirit are
miraculously in tune and work together in God-given
concert. It would be quite impossible for any human brain,
coming at it cold, however strenuous its endeavours, to
fathom and fulfill all the demands made by the form of this
play. And this is why the following explanations of the
play’s sum and substance are not to be taken as an apologia
for preconceived authorial intentions, dating from the outset
of composition, but must be looked on as discoveries which
I have been able to make since writing it, returning to it with
a mind refreshed.
I wanted to show six characters who are looking for an
author. The play cannot be performed because the author
they are looking for is missing; so instead we have the
comedy of their abortive search, with all the tragic
overtones which stem from the fact of their having been
rejected.
Can it be done? How do you represent a character you
have rejected? Obviously you can only give him expression
once he has taken shape in your imagination. And this is
exactly how the six characters took shape. They were fully
realised in my imagination as rejects: in search of another
author.
I must make clear what it is that I have rejected; not
the characters in themselves, obviously; but their drama,
doubtless of paramount interest to them, but which did not
interest me in the slightest, for the reasons I have already
given.
But think what your drama means to you if you are a
character.
If you are a creature of art or of the imagination, your
drama is your means of existence. You exist as a character
only in the context of, and by reason of, your drama. The
drama is the character’s raison d’être, his vital function;
without it he would cease to be.
In dealing with the six characters, I accepted their
being, while rejecting their reason for being. I isolated the
organism and asked of it, not its original function but a
different, more complex function, in which the original one
was no more than one factor amongst others. This created a
terrible and desperate situation, especially for the Father
and the Stepdaughter who crave life more intensely than the
others, and have a fuller awareness of their status as
characters, a status which gives them an absolute need of a
drama, their own drama, of course, the only one they can
imagine for themselves, but which they have seen rejected.
It is an ‘impossible’ situation, one which they feel they must
escape from at all costs; their life or death depends on it. It
is true that I provided them with another raison d’être
another function, the one offered by the ‘impossible’
situation, the drama of being rejected characters in search of
an author. But having had a life of their own already the
idea of this new raison d’être was way beyond their
comprehension. Never could they imagine that this might
now be their true essential function and the condition of
their existence. If someone were to tell them this, they
would simply not believe it. It is impossible to believe that
our sole reason for living lies in a torment which we find
both unjust and inexplicable.
In the light of all this I cannot imagine how my critics
justify their objection to the character of the Father on the
grounds that he oversteps the bounds of his function as a
character and usurps, at times, the role of author. I have a
gift for understanding those who do not understand me, and
this tells me that the objection arises from the fact that the
82
character expresses as his own a mental anguish which is
recognizably mine. Which is a perfectly natural thing and of
absolutely no significance. Quite apart from the fact that the
Father’s mental anguish springs from causes which are
worlds away from the drama of my own personal
circumstances, and is suffered and lived through for his
reasons and not mine, a consideration which alone destroys
the validity of the criticism, I would like to point out a
distinction. There is a clear difference between my own
inherent mental anguish which I can quite legitimately
reflect in a character, as an organic part of him, and the
activity engaged in by my mind in the creation of this work,
the activity which has as its end product the drama of the six
characters in search of an author. Now if the Father were
collaborating in this activity, if he were actually helping to
create this play about being an authourless character, then,
and only then, would it be fair to say that he was usurping
the author’s role and open to criticism on those grounds.
But the Father has not created his own status as ‘character
in search of an author’; he suffers it. He suffers it as an
inexplicable disaster and as a situation to be rebelled against
and rectified with every resource he can muster. So this is
what he is then, a “character in search of an author” purely
and simply, even if he does claim my mental anguish as his
own. If he were collaborating in the author’s act of creation,
he would have no problem in understanding the disaster
which has befallen him; he would see himself as a viable
character, conceived, certainly, as a rejected character, but
the product of a poet’s imagination like any other. He would
then have no reason to agonize over his desperate search for
someone to confirm and formulate his existence as a
character. I mean, he would accept quite happily the reason
for being his author has give him, and stop worrying about
any he might give himself, he could snap his fingers at the
Producer and his troupe instead of regarding them as a
lifeline.
There is one character who is completely untroubled
by this need simply to live, to live for the sake of living. It
never occurs to her that she is not alive It has never crossed
her mind to wonder how she is alive, by what means or in
what sense She has no notion that she is a character because
she is never even momentarily, outside her ‘part’ She does
not know she has a “part”.
Her unawareness is a natural part of her role as Mother
requires her to be close to nature; it does not demand any
mental exertion, she does not exist as mind, she lives in a
perpetual state of unresolved emotion which renders her
incapable of realizing what she is, of knowing she is a
character. But even so, she too is searching for an author in
her own way and for her own reasons At one point she
seems glad to have been brought along to meet the
Producer. Is it because she hopes he can give her life? No: it
is because she hopes he will make her perform a scene with
her son into which she herself would put life, her own life,
all that she can of it. But it is a scene which does not exist.
It has never taken place and never could. Her hope of
playing it shows how totally unaware she is that she is a
character and of the limitations of the life available to her,
fixed and predetermined in every moment, every gesture,
every word.
She turns up on the stage with the other characters, but
without any idea of what they are making her do. She
obviously has her own view of the manic desire for life
which possesses both her husband and her daughter nd is
the reason for her being here at all: as far as her tormenting
and tormented spouse is concerned this is just another of his
unusual weird and wonderful fixations; in her poor,
misguided daughter’s case, she is filled with sheer horror at
what she sees as fresh evidence of wantonness and
rebellion. The Mother is completely passive. Everything
about her circumstances, her life and what she thinks of it
all, is conveyed by the others; only once does she contradict
them, and that is when her maternal instinct rises and rebels
and she feels bound to explain that she never wanted to
abandon either her son or her husband; her son was taken
from her and her husband forced her to go. But she is
simply setting the factual record straight; her knowledge and
understanding are nil.
She is, in essence, Nature; Nature flied and perceived
as Mother.
This character did afford me one satisfaction which
was new and must not be forgotten. Nearly all my critics,
having in the past indiscriminately labelled my characters as
peculiarly and irredeemably “inhuman”, have had the
goodness to say “with real pleasure” of this one, that here at
lad my imagination has produced a truly human figure. The
reason for their compliment I think is this: that the poor old
Mother, being all Nature, all Mother, and completely tied in
her behaviour by her equation with this role, with no
opportunity for the free exercise of the mind, emerges more
or less as a chunk of flesh, fully alive in all her maternal
functions: procreating; feeding, tending and loving her
young; but with no need whatsoever to exercise her brain.
And in this she is seen to be the realization of the true and
perfect “human type”. This must be so, since there appears
to be no attribute of the human organism more superfluous
than the mind.
But the critics, in spite of their nice compliment, have
pretty well dismissed the Mother without exploring in any
depth the complex of poetic values represented by this
character in the play. I can grant that she is a very human
figure because she is mindless and so is either quite
unaware of being what she is or simply does not question it.
But the fact that she does not know she is a character does
not stop her being one. And in my play, this is her drama.
And its most vital expression comes leaping out of her in
her cry to the Producer when he is trying to make her realise
that it has all happened already, and there is no cause now
to shed any more tears, and she cries out: “No, it’s
happening now! It’s happening all the time! My agony isn’t
made up! I am living my agony constantly, every moment; I
am alive and it is alive and it keeps coming back, again and
again, as fresh as the first time.” She feels this, but she does
not know that she feels it; it is experienced as something
inexplicable: but felt in such a terrible way that it does not
even occur to her that it is something that needs explaining,
83
either to herself or to the others. She feels it, full stop. She
feels it as pain and it comes straight out as pain in her cry.
This is her way of giving utterance to the fixedness of life,
which torments the Father and the Stepdaughter in quite a
different way. These two are Mind where the Mother is
Nature. Mind either rebels against fixity or seeks to exploit
it; Nature, unless stirred up by sense, responds to it with
tears.
The inherent conflict between the movement of life
and the fixity of form is an inexorable condition not only of
the spiritual order but of the physical order as well. Life can
only come about by fixing itself in our corporeal form; it
then proceeds to kill that form. Nature mourns this fixity in
the irreversible and relentless process of the bodyts ageing.
The Mother’s mourning is similarly passive and perpetual.
My device of giving this inherent human conflict three
different faces in the play, of embodying it in three separate
but simultaneous dramas, enables it to make its fullest
impact. And what is more, the Mother’s words are a
declaration of the unparalleled power of Artistic form: the
only form which does not constrain or destroy life and
which life does not destroy, in her cry to the Producer. If the
Father and the Stepdaughter were to start all over again and
re-enact their scene a hundred thousand times, her cry
would still be uttered precisely at that point; it would ring
out over and over again at the precise moment demanded by
the life of the work of art: unchanging and unchangeable in
its form; but not in any. way a mechanical repetition or
refrain, wrung from her by external pressure; but every time
quite unexpected, bursting out afresh into new life,
preserved for eternity in its imperishable living form. In just
the same way, whenever we open the book, we shall always
find the live Francesca confessing her sweet sin to Dante;
and even if we go back again and again and read the
passage a hundred thousand times, then, again and again, a
hundred thousand times Francesca will speak her words,
never in mechanical repetition, but every time as if for the
first time, with such animated and unpremeditated passion
that every time Dante will swoon in response. All living
things, because they have life, have form, and for that
reason must die: except the work of art, which lives in fact
for ever, in that it is form itself.
The birth of a creature of the human imagination is the
step across the threshold separating nothingness from
eternity. This birth may sometimes be brought about quite
suddenly, precipitated by necessity. While a play is
gestating in the imagination, if a new character is needed to
supply some necessary speech or action, he is born to order,
exactly as required. This is the manner of Madame Pace’s
birth among the six characters, and it takes our breath away;
it is like some convincing illusionist’s trick. But it isn’t a
trick; it is a birth. The new character is alive, not because
she was alive already, but because she has been successfully
brought into being after the manner of her kind, as a
“necessary” character. Theatrically the result is a break, a
sudden change in the level of reality, because such a birth
can only take place in the mind of a writer; it can’t happen
on the boards of a stage. Before anyone has realised what
has happened, I have moved the scene: I have
instantaneously shifted it back into my imagination without
removing it from the spectators’ gaze. I have set before
them, not the stage now, but my own imagination in the
guise of that stage, caught in the act of Creation. This
unforeseen and autonomous shifting of a given phenomenon
from one plane of reality to another is a sort of miracle,
rather like what happens when the statue of a Saint starts to
move; at that precise moment you cannot say that the statue
is made of wood or stone. Mine of course is not an arbitrary
miracle. The stage itself is fluid; in becoming the vehicle for
the imaginative reality of the six characters it cannot exist as
a fixed unalterable entity in its own right, just as, indeed,
there is nothing established and preconceived anywhere in
this play: everything here is in the making, shifting,
experimental and unpremeditated. Even the place, the site of
all this desperate transmutation backwards and forward of
formless, form-seeking life, has a shifting level of reality,
and reaches a point where it changes organically.
When I first had the idea of making Madame Pace
come into being before my eyes on the stage, I sensed that I
could do it and I did it. If I had realised that her birth was
going to have this effect of suddenly, silently, almost
imperceptibly upsetting and recasting the scene’s plane of
reality, I surely would not have done it; the apparent
illogicality of the idea would have restrained me. And the
beauty of the work would have been lost. I was saved from
delivering this death-blow by the sheer fervour of my
inspiration, for contrary to all appearances and the
misleading requirements of logic, the fantastic birth of
Madame Pace is dictated by necessity and is intimately and
mysteriously related to the whole life of the play.
The allegation that she does not quite come off
because of the quasi-Romantic, unstructured and chaotic
manner of her composition, is to my mind absurd.
I understand what makes people say this. It is because
the inner drama involving my six characters appears to be
presented as a kind of free-for-all, without any co-ordinating
pattern: there is no logical development, no sequential order
to events. This is quite true. Had I searched until kingdom
come I could not have found a method which was more
harum scarum, more weird, more arbitrary and complex,
and indeed more romantic, than the one I have used to
present the inner drama of the six characters. All this is true,
but I have not in fact presented that drama: the one I have
presented is an entirely different one—need I repeat it—in
which among other delights available to the discerning
spectator is to be found a modest satire on Romantic
procedures. This can be seen in the heated struggle engaged
in by my characters to eclipse each other as they act out
their roles in one drama, while all the time I have cast them
in quite a different one of which they are oblivious; their
tempestuous emotionalism which might stamp them as
Romantic is thereby deprived of any solid basis and is
placed on a humouristic footing. And the characters’ own
drama emerges in my work in the only way it can, not in the
form it would have taken had I accepted it as a play in its
own right, but as a rejected play, a bare ‘situation’,
84
developed spasmodically, in hints, in sudden rushes, in
violent foreshortenings, in chaos and confusion: it is
constantly interrupted, deflected, made to contradict itself; it
is not even lived by two of its characters and is repudiated
by another.
There is one character in fact, the Son, who repudiates
the drama which makes him a ‘character’, and derives his
whole dramatic weight and significance not from his role in
the inner play—in this he hardly appears at all—but from
his role in the play which I have made about it. Indeed he is
the only one who exists exclusively as a ‘character in search
of an author’; the author he is looking for is not a
playwright. This too was something which could not have
been done in any other way. The character’s attitude is
absolutely basic to my conception of him, just as it is
absolutely logical that he should add to the disorder and
confusion of the situation by introducing yet another note of
Romantic conflict.
It was this natural organic chaos that I had to put on
the stage; and the staging of chaos does not mean at all the
same thing as chaotic staging in the Romantic manner. My
presentation is perfectly clear, straightforward and orderly;
it can hardly be called confused when all the audiences of
the world have had no difficulty whatever in grasping the
work’s plot, characters and differing levels of fantasy e
drama and comedy; and when its finer subtleties perceived
by those who look more closely.
Great must be the confusion of tongues among men if
this kind of criticism can find utterance. But if the confusion
of tongues outside is great, equally great is the perfect
inward law which, followed to the letter, makes of my play
a classic model in forbidding the use of words at its
catastrophe. Just at the point when all have finally
understood that life cannot be created through artifice, and
that the six characters’ drama cannot be played without an
author to quicken it with spirit, the Producer, full of vulgar
curiosity about how the story ends, gets the Son to give a
blow-by-blow account of the sequence of events; the
catastrophe explodes brutally and uselessly—it makes no
sense and needs no human words—with the detonation of a
firearm on the stage, cutting into and dissolving the sterile
experiment of characters and actors, apparently without the
aid of the poet.
The poet meanwhile, without their knowledge, has
been biding his time, looking on as if from a distance
throughout their tentative struggles, and waiting to make of
these the very substance of a work of his own.
Robert Rietty. (1988). “Introduction.” Luigi Pirandello:
Collected Plays. Vol.2 London: John Calder, Publisher.
85
he used to give the characters of his future stories an
audience every Sunday morning from eight until one
o’clock, when they were allowed to ask questions and argue
to their heart’s content. This privilege was not limited to the
children of the author’s fantasy, for other characters from
books which he had read used to force their way into the
reception-room and insist on exposing their arguments and
complaints.
“Nature,” he says, “uses the instrument of human
fantasy in order to follow her high creative purpose. A
character in a play comes to life just as a tree, as a stone, as
water, as a butterfly, as a woman. And he who has the
fortune to be born a character can afford to jeer even at
death, for he will never die. And to live for ever he has no
need of amazing gifts or miracle working. Who was Sancho
Panza? Who was Don Abbondio? And yet they live on
eternally as live germs—just because they had the good luck
to find a fertilizing womb, an imagination which knew how
to bring them up and nourish them so that they might live
for ever.”
With delightful fantasy Pirandello makes his six
phantom characters arrive at a theatre while a rehearsal is in
progress. The stage is bare except for the prompter’s box, a
small table for the manager and various chairs scattered
about. The company are rehearsing one of Pirandello’s
plays, II Giuoco delle Parti—a play which is giving great
trouble to the actors and the plethoric manager, who
exclaims: “Ridiculous, do you call it? What can I do if no
good plays come from France and we are reduced to put on
the stage plays by Pirandello, which require a “highbrow” to
understand them, and never satisfy either the actors, the
critics or the public? “Then, to the great amazement of all,
the six characters advance up the stage to the manager. As
the author says in a stage direction, “a tenuous light
surrounds them, as if radiating from them—it is the faint
breath of their fantastic reality.”2 They are characters that
the author had sketched out temporarily in a play that he
was writing, but was unable to finish. Feeling that their
nature has only been half realized, they have come to
propose to the manager that they should be allowed to act
the drama which seethes within them.
The Six Characters are as follows:—The character
called the father is about fifty, hair reddish in colour, thin on
the temples, but not bald. His thick moustaches curl round
his still fresh mouth, which opens often into a queer,
uncertain smile. He is rather fat and pale, with a large,
expansive forehead. His blue, oval-shaped eyes are clear
and piercing; he wears light-coloured trousers and a dark
coat. In manner he is gentleness itseg though at times he has
violent outbursts. The mother seems to be terrified and
crushed under an intolerable weight of shame and
humiliation. She is dressed in widow’s weeds, and when she
lifts her veil she reveals a face of wax-like pallor. Her eyes
she keeps continually lowered. The step-daughter is a girl of
eighteen, most self-assured and impudent.1 Her elegant,
showy black frock reveals her beauty. She shows the utmost
contempt for the timid frightened manner of her young,
gawkish brother of fourteen who is also dressed in black.
The Theatre Within: Six Characters
in Search of an Author
By Walter Starkie
The majority of the plays of (Luigi) Pirandello which
we have considered deal with the problem of reality and
unreality, and, as many critics have shown, this master of
irony with his band of marionettes has transported on to the
stage the anti-logical and anti-rational ideas of
contemporary philosophy. He is an idealist in the sense that
he allows the mentality of man complete supremacy and
makes thought the leaven which sets Life in fermentation.1
Reality becomes a matter to be judged by the individual
who feels the emotion intensely, not a matter to be judged
by the cold opinion of the majority. The only test for the
reality of any experience is the emotion which engenders
that reality: Laura, the heroine of L’Innesto, has a child by
the man who ravished her, but her love only exists for her
husband Giorgio, and so she feels as a reality that the child
is his. In Tutto Per Bene Martino Lori persuades Palma to
accept the reality that he is her father, though both know
that she is the daughter of another. Pirandello sees deep
down into human character beneath all the manifold
constructions which society has raised as a protection of the
majority. If we take a comprehensive view of the plays, we
shall find that the whole collection resembles a set of
symphonic variations on the same theme, reality and illusion
which, like the fundamental motif of Tristan and Isolde,
rises by contrast.
The next play we shall consider—Sei Personaggi in
Cerca d’Autore—acts as a kind of coda to the symphonic
variations of Pirandello’s previous works. It sums up
Pirandello’s philosophy and also exposes his theories with
regard to the art of drama. If in the other plays the author
turns his searching rays on the life of the world, in the Six
Characters the process is reversed, and we gaze into the
world of the actor, behind the brilliantly lighted stage, into
the dingy dark spaces where work the wirepullers for the
puppets. No more striking attempt has ever been made to
show the successive steps in the evolution of a character
from the moment it leaves the author’s brain until it
expresses itself on the stage for the public in the crowded
auditorium. The majority of people imagine that the
characters which fret and strut their hour upon the stage are
all dependent on the author’s will, as new-born children are
attached to their mother. Pirandello in this play shows that
such an idea is erroneous. When a character is born, he
says, it acquires such individuality, such independence that
it can release itself entirely from subservience to its author
and appear in situations and conflicts for which it was never
intended. The idea of setting the character in conflict with
the author seems to have occurred to Pirandello, first of all,
in “La Tragedia d’un Personaggio” (The Tragedy of a
Character), a novella contained in the collection La
Trappola (1913). In that novella the author described how
86
through lack of his mother’s influence, grew up taciturn and
austere in manners. Then the father became curious to find
out the whereabouts of the other children of his wife. He felt
tortured by remorse for the way he had treated her. “I really
wanted,” he says, “ to believe that she was living in peace
and plenty, devoting herself to the simple cares of life,
fortunate because she was far away from my inner complex
struggles.” He longed to see the three illegitimate children
who had grown up around her. One day he went to visit the
school at which the eldest step-daughter attended as pupil.
Then soon afterwards he plucked up courage and gave her a
present of a straw hat ornamented with a garland of roses.
“It was first of all,” he says, “curiosity and then a feeling of
tenderness that attract~d me gradually towards my wife’s
family.” But the wife looked with dismay on his increasing
intimacy with the daughter, and in order to break off the
relationship, she disappeared to another city with the clerk
and the three children. The father then lost all traces of them
for some years. In the interval the mother sank into poverty
owing to the death of her companion, and in dire straits she
returned to her native city and started working for a living.
The stepdaughter was now a grown girl of eighteen, and she
acted as intermediary between her mother and the
fashionable Madame Pace, for whom the former did sewing.
The “modiste” establishment of Madame Pace had many
other attractions in addition to dressmaking. It was a
convenient “rendezvous” for clandestine lovers, and private
rooms were provided for the purpose. The stepdaughter,
being beautiful and of an easy disposition, was easily led
astray by the astute “celestina” Madame Pace, and led a life
of vice. At this point the drama broke out in all its violence.
The father, though a most respectable member of society,
was a frequenter of Madame Pace’s establishment. To the
stage-manager he excuses himself thus: “Each of us, sir, in
society before the others is clothed in dignity. But each one
knows within himself what non-confessable things take
place there. We give way to temptation only to rise up again
soon afterwards, and with great anxiety re-establish in all its
pristine solidarity our dignity, as if it were a tombstone
which conceals from our eyes any sign and any recollection
of our shame.” On one of his visits to the shop he meets the
stepdaughter, and as he does not recognize her, he
accompanies her upstairs in order to satisfy his lust. The
sordid deed is about to be consummated, when, by one of
those wonderful and characteristic stage coincidences, the
mother suddenly enters the room and shrieks in terror when
she sees the guilty pair. The father then, after the narrow
escape he has had, welcomes his wife. He will bring her
back with her children to his home and at last there will be
peace for all. But as the saying goes,” l’homme propose, et
Dieu dispose”; the house, instead of reflecting a new life of
harmony, becomes a veritable Bedlam. The stepdaughter
knows the true history of this grey-haired old satyr who had
exposed so clearly his vicious propensities, and feels fierce
hatred as well as disgust when she finds that he was her
mother’s husband. No less does she loathe the haughty,
supercilious son who looks on all the newcomers as
intruders. The mother, between the blatant bad temper of
She shows a great tenderness towards her little sister a child
of about four years, who is dressed in white with a sash of
black silk round her waist. The son is twenty-two years old,
tall, and, as it were, encased in an attitude of disdain
towards the father and of supercilious indifference towards
his mother. He gives us the impression that he has come on
the stage against his will.
From this description it will be seen that not all these
characters have the same degree of dramatic vitality. The
father and the stepdaughter were evidently those that struck
the author’s mind with the first flush of inspiration, and so
they are very nearly completely realized. The others are on
different planes. The mother and the gawkish boy are
nebulous characters whose personality did not appear clear
and defined to the dramatist’s mentality. The former, as the
author says, is not a woman ; but she is a mother, and her
drama lies in her children. The son, with his haughty
superciliousness, had only occurred en passant. As these
Six Characters owe their existence to dramatic creation,
they cannot prevent themselves from rushing to express
themselves: they must get the opportunity of reaching their
completion as parts of the drama. With the help of the
manager and his company, they hope to be able to draft
their play. The manager, like all managers, is of a crusty
disposition, and objects strongly to this unwarranted
interruption of his rehearsal: “What do you want here?” he
cries. “We want to live,” answers the father excitedly.
“Where is the text of the play?” continues the manager. But
the father then replies: “The drama is in us: we are the
drama, and we are impatient to represent it: our inner
passion drives us to this.” Then, to prove their words, they
start off spontaneously acting the play and gradually fitting
into their place in the dramatic scheme. The actors and
actresses at first are inclined to laugh and jeer at their
strange visitors, but gradually they become interested in the
scene. The play, developing as it does in a queer, jerky,
explosive manner, is entirely characteristic of Pirandello. It
is not like the Spanish Armada play in The Critic, where
high-sounding, ridiculous bombast is parodied with keen
thrusts, nor is it a play for the author to air his satiric
“persiflage” like Fanny’s First Play, by Bernard Shaw.
Pirandello, as in all his other plays, is looking past the stage
and its actors to the abstract problems of life. He has made
another great attempt to express dramatically the various
phases that man’s mind goes through.
The plot centres in the unhappy father who is married
to the character known as the mother. They have one child,
the haughty-looking son. The father had a clerk in his
business who frequented his house as a friend. Seeing that
this man was in iove with his wife, he made her go away
with him rather than have her moping at home. The son he
kept by him as his solace. The mother when she went to live
with the clerk had three illegitimate children by him—the
stepdaughter, the boy of fourteen and the baby. Meanwhile,
the father has found life still more wearisome without his
wife. “After she went away,” he says, “my house seemed
suddenly empty. She was my incubus, but still she filled it—
I wandered about through the rooms aimlessly.” The son,
87
the stepdaughter, the silent contempt of the son, and the
horrible incident of Madame
Pace’s parlour, is completely broken in spirit. Her
greatest torments arise from the fact that she cannot
approach her eldest, legitimate son and explain all the
tragedy. His silent disdain and indifference are more
wounding to her than the acute sensation that shame is
impressed indelibly on her family. Her troubles do not even
end at this stage; one day the youngest child, who was
playing in the garden near a pond, falls in and is drowned.
The brother of fourteen, seeing his sister drown, draws a
revolver from his pocket and shoots himself.
Such is the plot of this nebulous nightmare play which
Pirandello sketches out for us by means of the Six
Characters, with their jerky, excitable utterance, punctuated
by the interruptions of the manager and the actors. Indeed, it
may be said that this play in the making, with its
complexities, is only a slight exaggeration of the author’s
usual method. With its fantastic personages it gradually
thrusts the original play into the wings, and all the actors
and actresses listen in breathless interest when the
stepdaughter begins to describe the scene in Madame Pace’s
parlour. The manager, who sees the possibility of a striking
play, casts the parts for his company: they must watch the
performance of the characters so as to make their own
performance afterwards as lifelike as possible. One
character is wanting to the scene—Madame Pace herself.
The characters, however, by arranging the stage in a
manner that suggests the modiste’s shop, evoke Madame
Pace herself. She appears at the back of the stage, to the
amazement of the actors and actresses. Her hair wears the
artificial hue of peroxide; rouge and powder conceal the
wrinkles of her fifty years. At her arrival amidst the Six
Characters the obligatory scene starts, irresistibly impelled
by their violent desire to achieve complete self-expression.
When the scene is finished, the manager’s company then
repeat the scene after their own fashion. The scene
performed by them seems altogether a different thing: the
leading actor who is taking the part of the Father enters with
the breezy manner of an old beau the leading lady playing
the Stepdaughter becomes the conventional stage barmaid
type. The Father and the Stepdaughter naturally cannot
recognize themselves in the stage-struck poses of their
interpreters, and break out into impatient gestures of I
disapproval and laugh satirically.
but if she is meant to be me, I can assure her that
if I heard anyone say ‘Good evening’ to me in
that way, I should burst out laughing as I did.”
FATHER. “Yes, it was the manner, the tone!”
MANAGER. “What are you talking about—
manner and tone? You stand aside at once and let
me see the show!”
LEADING ACTOR. “If I have to represent an
old man entering a house of doubtful
reputation—!”
MANAGER. “Don’t mind them, for goodness’
sake! continue: the show is going splendidly.”
With wonderful subtlety Pirandello has analysed the
contrast between the reality that exists in the mind of the
author and the conventional art of the stage. The characters
of the author, with the bloom of his sensitiveness still upon
them, cry out for their own individuality, but the manager
answers that they only achieve personality through the
actors.
“Your personality is only raw material here, and the
actors give body and shape, voice and gesture to it. And
those actors—according to their lights—have known how to
give expression to far nobler material ; while your play is so
small that if it holds its own on the stage, the merit, believe
me, will be entirely due to my actors.”
FATHER. “I shouldn’t dare to contradict you, sir. But
consider that it is inhuman suffering for us who are
constituted thus, with these bodies, these features—”
MANAGER. (Interrupting impatiently.) “As to
your face, my dear sir, make-up will remedy
that!”
FATHER. “Yes. But what about the voice, the
gestures?”
MANAGER. “Oh ! well—here you cannot be
yourself! Here it is the actor who represents you,
and that is all I have to say.”
FATHER. “I understand, sir. But now I think that
I can guess why our author who saw us live thus
did not wish to bring us on the stage. I do not
want to offend your actors—Heaven forbid. But I
think that. . . however the actor strives with willpower and art to assume my personality, his
performance can hardly be a representation of me
as I really am. It will be, with the exception of the
make-up—an interpretation of me as he sees
me—not as I feel myself in my inner
consciousness to be.”
FATHER. (At once, unable to restrain himself.)
“No!”
(The Stepdaughter, seeing the leading actor make
his entry thus, bursts out laughing.)
MANAGER. (Turning round, furious.) “Silence!
Stop that laughing at once! We can’t go on like
this!”
STEPDAUGHTER. “Excuse me, sir, it is most
natural that we should laugh. The lady there
(pointing to the leading lady) stands there still;
88
In this passage we again perceive the “teatro dello
speechio”—the mirror showing the individual a reflection of
his own image which he cannot recognize. The mirror, in
the case of these phantom embrybnic characters, is dramatic
art itself, which distorts and deforms Life. Tilgher points
out in his criticism of the play that Pirandello unconsciously
transforms those phantom, half-realized characters from the
plane of fantasy on to the plane of life as it is lived.3 This
dualism adds to the ever-increasing confusion of the play,
which ends in chaos. The chaos arises chiefly because each
of the characters, obsessed by his own reality which has to
be respected, tries to capture the centre of the stage, the
place in the limelight, to the detriment of the others—all
except the Son, who keeps on announcing in a surly voice
that he did not want to be brought into the play at all. The
manager in vain tries to enclose them within the hard-andfast rules of the stage that are tempered by long tradition,
and rebukes the Stepdaughter for monopolizing the
attention.
the character created by the artist’s imagination has its life
fixed within immutable bounds.”
The tragedy of all these characters comes from this
rigidity; they are fixed in the one disastrous reality of their
lives. The Mother is fixed in the moment of horror when she
found her guilty husband with the Stepdaughter; the
Stepdaughter is fatally attached to that sordid room of the
modiste where she must play her scene of climax. The
Father, too, is for ever fixed to that scene which shows up
only one side of his reality. It is thus that he states the drama
arising from this: “The drama, sir, in my opinion, lies in the
conscience that I have, and that each of us has. We believe
ourselves one person, but it is true to say that we are many
persons, many according to the possibilities of being which
exist within us. We are one for this and another for that
person—always diverse and yet filled with the illusion that
our personality is always the same for all.... Now you
understand the treachery of that girl: she surprised me in a
place where she should not have known me, and in a way
that I could not exist for her. She then insists on attaching to
me a reality which I could never have expected to assume
for her in a fleeting, shameful moment of my life.” To that
fleeting moment of his life, when his unsuspected cave-man
personality came to the surface, the Father is indissolubly
linked, and to the end of time he will have to go on playing
his part. It is the same idea as we find in Henry IV and other
plays of Pirandello. Henry IV assumes the mask of Emperor
for one evening’s enjoyment, but by the irony of Fate he is
crystallized in that mask by madness. When he recovers, he
finds that there is no possibility of throwing off the mask,
for it has attached itself to him inextricably. The world will
not accept his existence except as the Emperor, and so he
returns to play the part.
The Father came to life in the author’s mind as the
protagonist of the scene in the dressmaker’s shop, and
however he strives; he must remain fixed in the situation.
He cannot, like real human beings, change from one
personality to another, for he has been crystallized as one
personality.
With great art Pirandello shows by means of those
half-evolved characters, in contrast to the actors of real life,
the antithesis between Life and Art. The Six Characters,
with their violent striving towards self-expression, are
driven on by their Life impulse: they have no discipline, no
power of synthesis, and so their play can never reach any
conclusion. If art is to be produced, there must be harmony
and the characters must all work towards that end. But the
Son, who is only a very faintly sketched character, and one
that seems to have appeared only as an afterthought to the
author, refuses to work in with the others towards a
conclusion. Then the morose boy character to whom
nobody had paid any attention draws a revolver and kills
himself and the play, and the characters rush off the stage
carrying his body. He, too, had acted, driven on by blind
impulse. The play thus fails to emerge, because these
characters, with their raw vital impulses, will not coordinate and accept the dictates of the manager. The
manager on his side is not characteristic of the brilliant
STEPDAUGHTER. “I will not stop! I see that
you and he have arranged what is possible on the
stage...I understand. He wishes to arrive at once
at the scene of his mental processes; but I want to
represent my own personal drama.”
MANAGER.
(Annoyed,
shrugging
his
shoulders.) “Oh! Just your part! Excuse me, but
there are other parts as well as yours! There is his
part (points to the Father) and the Mother’s part!
On the stage it is not right for a character to come
too much into prominence and put the others in
the shade. The right course is to keep them all
within a neat scheme and only show what is
capable of representation. I know full well that
each of us has an inner life which he longs to
reveal. But the difficulty consists in setting out
just what is necessary with regard to the others,
and at the same time in that slight revelation hint
at the life which lies within, undiscovered.”
These words of the manager are characteristic of the
psychological dramas of Butti, Bracco and Pirandello. They
tecall the critical preface which Bracco wrote to Piccolo
Santo, where he said that a comprehensive synthesis of
significant signs can confer to the stage the necessary
clearness for rendering even what is not truly expressed.
The dialogue and outer action in Piccolo Santo are merely
outer symbols which are to put the audience into the
intuitive state of mind when it can understand the hidden
play.
In the last part of the play a fierce argument starts
between the manager and the Father as to the meaning of
the word reality. The manager disputes the latter’s
contention that the Six Characters are more real than human
beings. But the Father sustains his point: “Human beings,”
he says, “are ever-changeable, and their reality changes
from today to tomorrow, and on they pass and die away, but
89
producers that contemporary dramatic technique has
evolved; he makes a very poor attempt to cope with the
difficulties raised by this complex play. Instead of realizing
that such a play must pass through the complicated process
of evolution before it can take shape, he greedily tries to
improvise it, perhaps led astray by the example of his
ancestors of the “Commedia deli’ arte” with their zibaldoni.
In the figure of this bloated manager, Pirandello satirized
the usual stage-struck producer whose few thoughts are
centred on the box office and on the “long run.” Thus the
play, which starts by being a profound study of art and life,
a contrast between reality and fantasy, ends as a grotesque
of the Cavacchioli or Antonelli type, showing up by
flashlight the seams and fissures in modern stage illusion.
In the last act of the play the author seems to say over
and over again to us by means of his fantastic characters:
“How difficult the art of evolving plays is! Not only must
the dramatist catch his idea and imprison it within his mind,
he must also observe Life minutely and draw general
conclusions from his observations. But even then his task is
not nearly over. The phantom children of his imaginations,
like the Six Characters, are self-willed: they will not coordinate in harmony, but prefer to think of themselves as the
nucleus of the whole play. They are the products of the
author’s fantasy—that quicksilver fantasy which darts hither
and thither with utter lack of discipline. Even when the
author has succeeded in marshalling his characters together,
how is he going to enclose them within the traditional stage?
how is he going to transfuse their chaotic impulses into the
human actor, who has the task of transmitting their message
to the world?” All these questions Pirandello seems to ask
himself, and it is a tribute to his sincerity that he has not
tried to answer them ex cathedra. It is for this reason that
the play which begins seriously ends as a grotesque farce.
Pirandello was fundamentally a humorist, and in writing this
play he was not exclusively occupied with thoughts of
proving any universal truth about Life and Art. Up to a
certain point he allowed his brilliant fantasy to work its
way, aided by logic, and raise a construction, but then there
appeared his humour—that malign imp which delights in
pulling the construction down about his ears. In the first part
the author was intent on his subject, but as soon as the
characters began to function symmetrically the humour
started to wither them, and when we recall the savagely
grotesque, farcical satire of L’ Uomo, La Bestia e La Virtu,
we shall agree that the finale of the tragedy of the Six
Characters, which the critic Tilgher called absolutely
absurd, is logically true to Pirandello’s quaint humour.
Many qualities in the play are characteristic of the humorist,
especially the brilliant aphorisms. No dramatist of our times
in Europe, with the exception of Jacinto Benavente, had a
greater wealth of those gems of lightning thinking that
spring from the brain of the humorist. These sudden flashes
light up his dialogue and allow his thought to transfix our
minds. Examples could be multiplied like the following : “A
fact is like a sack which will not stand up when it is empty.
In order to make it stand up we must put into it the reason
and sentiment which caused it to exist.”:
“Every one of us has his own reality which
must be respected before God even when it is
harmful to oneself.”
“Please do not mention illusion: for us that
word is particularly unpleasant.”
In Six Characters Pirandello analysed the whole essence of
dramatic illusion. From the days when Aristophanes in The
Frogs held a trial of the respective representatives of drama
and weighed Aeschylus and Euripides in the scales, down to
modern times, the subject of dramatic criticism has been
treated frequently on the stage. Writers mostly devoted their
attention to contrasting, as Moratin did in La Comedia
Nueva, the man of common sense with the pedantic,
bombastic dramatists or else they preferred to parody
dramatically, as Echegaray did in El Critico Incipiente, or
Shaw in Fanny’s First Play, the idiosyncrasies of critics and
their contradictions.
At first sight it would seem that Pirandello’s play is a
twentieth-century propagation of Sheridan’s Critic.
Sheridan places the burlesque tragedy of the Armada and
Don Ferolo Whiskerandos within his comedy, and satirizes
the dramatic ideals of his day through the medium of Puff
and Sir Fretful Plagiary. The burlesque tragedy enclosed
within Pirandello’s play is a grotesquely deformed modern
tragedy, and one which would be intolerably depressing if
the author had not written it in a satiric mood. But
Pirandello has not really followed Sheridan’s mood and
written an exaggerated tragedy in order to satirize the drama
of his time: the tragedy of the Six Characters becomes an
instrument in his hands for interpreting the fundamental
problems of the theatre. He is not criticizing exclusively the
stage-manager or the actors or the critics, but the
fundamental essence of dramatic art; and no one up to this
has probed its mysteries with more acumen than he has in
this play. Mr. Ashley Dukes, in his brilliant apology of
Expressionism in modern drama, includes Pirandello among
the expressionists. “One of the aims of the expressionists,”
he says, “is to present character subjectively. We are asked
to regard the persons on the stage, not only with our own
eyes, but through their own emotional nature.”4 On the
objective stage it is a difficult task to present subjective
drama, yet Shakespeare accomplished the task in Hamlet,
and Ibsen in The Master Builder and The Lady from the
Sea—those noble symphonies of the inner and outer life.
Pirandello, who is an heir of Ibsen, has followed his
example, and in The Six Characters he pushes the
subjective portrayal of character to its logical conclusion.
Ashley Dukes says that characters subjectively presented
are like sleep-walkers functioning in response to a hidden
motive. They go through the play wrapped in a mantle of
sublime egoism. Their part is not to listen, but to speak.
This criticism applies to the Father and the Stepdaughter,
each of whom pays no heed to the other, so convinced are
they of being the nucleus of the drama. Their attitude
resembles that of Zero and Daisy, the two machine-made
clerks in The Adding Machine, by Elmer Rice, who express
90
one side of his character. In the second play” La Moreno”
becomes infuriated because she sees herself fixed on the
stage in an instinctive action which is unworthy. It is
interesting also to compare the two plays in other points.
The Six Characters can scarcely contain their merriment
when they see the attempt made by the actors to represent
them—the Father and the Stepdaughter cannot recognise
themselves in the stage-struck poses of their interpreters.
In Ciascuno a Suo Modo Pirandello seems to
contradict his former thesis. Baron Nuti and “La Moreno,”
so far from laughing at the actors’ attempt to represent their
personality, become passionately serious, as if they
recognised their innermost thoughts. And to make his
meaning more explicit, Pirandello at the end makes them
copy the actors on the stage. In the acted play the old man
insists on carrying away the young woman with him in spite
of her repulsion from him. So too does the Baron Nuti
prevail on “La Moreno,” and the astonished spectators
watch the stage scene repeated in real life before their eyes.
Now that we have examined these two plays, we
cannot but agree that they mark a date in the history of the
Italian theatre which it will not be possible for the old
drama to ignore. They have turned the theatre as we know it
inside out. No other dramatist of modern times has analysed
with such logical clearness the whole essence of theatrical
illusion. Not only is Pirandello a dramatist gifted with a
talent for vivid epigrams, but he is also a metaphysician,
and though that is sometimes a danger to him, his clearness
of reasoning admirably balances his sensitive temperament.
As to the fundamental ideas contained in The Six
Characters and Each in his Own Way, we must not think
that they have sprung straight from Pirandello’s brain. Other
authors have thought of similar ideas, but have not
developed them in the same way. In no less a work than
Don Quixote of Cervantes do we find a precedent to The Six
Characters. As Spanish critics have shown, Cervantes was
the first great writer in modern literature to establish
definitely the conflict between the reality and fantasy. In
that work for the first time we find the character claiming
the right to live independently. In the second part of Don
Quixote the principal characters of the work begin to show
us a double personality; they are real beings who live their
own life independently and yet they are also literary figures.
Bartolomé Carrasco, the student from Salamanca, comes
and tells Sancho that Don Quixote and his squire are
already the subject of books and that many things were
related about them by the historian.5
As Professor Castro shows, we have there the theatre
within the theatre, and Sancho and his master henceforth
always feel that their life is material for a future historian
who will take them as models. Don Quixote was
disconsolate, thinking that the historian might not write of
his noble adventures with all the dignity they deserved. We
thus find the same fear on the part of the character lest he
may be misunderstood by the interpreter as we noticed in
Pirandello’s plays. Of course there are many differences
between Cervantes and Pirandello; in the former the
characters are conscious that they have a full life of their
aloud their subjective unconnected thoughts as they tot up
the interminable figures. But Pirandello has not followed
Rice to the extreme limits of Expressionism; he still clings
on to the clear, well-knit dialogue of his predecessors. And
it is this clear, unexaggerated, well-balanced spirit which
gives Pirandello that great ascendancy over the dramatists
of the Modern Movement in Italy who lose themselves amid
the maze of the grotesque and the fantastic.
Now that we have considered Pirandello’s chief play
dealing with the evolution of dramatic character, we should
give our attention to Ciascuno a Suo Modo (Each in his
Own Way), 1924, which treats the same subject, only from
a different angle. In this play the author presents a grotesque
Pirandellian play on the stage. Then after each act he has
what he calls an “intermezzo,” wherein we are transported
to the other side of the footlights and listen to the excited
commentaries made by a bewildered public. Some are
haughty
Pirandellians,
and
gaze
with
serene
imperturbability on the excited philistines; others are
dramatic critics who are afraid of compromising their
reputations by showing enthusiasm or disdain; others, again,
are honest folk who are frankly entirely befogged by this
new author, so much at variance with the old romantic
drama. Then we suddenly meet two excited people—an old
man and a young woman. They create a disturbance in the
theatre and rush on to the stage. We then learn that the play
represented on the stage is a key play, and the infuriated
pair have recognised their own sad life story as related by
the actors. Thus there are in Ciascuno a Suo Modo three
planes of reality. The play in the first act appeared on the
foreground as a representation of incidents from real life.
Then in the first “intermezzo,” when the scene shows the
foyer of the theatre with its gesticulating public, the scene of
the first act is driven into the background and appears as a
fiction created by art. At the end even the foyer of the
theatre and the spectators are driven into the back -ground
when it is known that the play represented on the stage is a
key play constructed by the author from a cas célèbre
recently discussed in the newspapers—the story of the
actress “La Moreno,” the Baron Nuti and the sculptor
Giacomo La Vela, who committed suicide on account of
them. The presence in the theatre amidst the spectators of”
La Moreno” and the Baron Nuti establishes a degree of
reality still closer to life than that of the spectators, who are
only discussing a piece of fiction. In the final choral
“intermezzo” Pirandello shows all the conflict between
these three planes of reality wherein the real personages of
the drama attack those who are on the stage and the
spectators who try to interfere. Thus the play cannot go on
any more. Ciascuno a Suo Modo is a variation on a theme
in The Six Characters in Search of an Author. In that play
one of the central ideas is the contrast between the fixed
reality of the literary character and the ever changing reality
of human beings. The tragedy of the Six Characters is that
they are fixed in the one disastrous reality of their lives. The
Stepdaughter is fixed to the sordid scene in Madam Pace’s
parlour; the Stepfather, too, is fixed eternally to that
shameful reality which was only a fleeting moment, only
91
own, for they have been realized by the author; in the latter
the dramatic conflict really arises because the author has
never completed the evolution of the Six Characters. But the
despair of Don Quixote and his squire is nearly as great as
that of “La Moreno” and Baron Nuti when they find that
they have been put into the book of so doltish a writer as
Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, who would be utterly
incapable of understanding their complex personality. In
later days Spanish writers have treated the theme of the
character versus the author. Miguel de Unamuno in his
novel Xiebla (1908), also anticipates the method of Luigi
Pirandello. The plot is a vain unvarnished story of love and
jealousy. But Augusto, the wronged party, does not end the
story in the conventional manner. He goes off to find the
author. When he meets him at Salamanca, he informs him of
his intention to commit suicide. The author, however, tells
him that he cannot die, as no such person exists in reality as
Augusto. He must go on living in the fantasy of his author.
Unamuno, thus, does not drive the idea so far as Pirandello,
who says that when a character is born it obtains such
independence even of the author that it can acquire a
meaning which the author never thought of giving it.
Walter Starkie. (1967). “The Theatre from Within: Six
Characters in Search of an Author.” Luigi Pirandello. Los
Angeles: University of California.
Notes
1. A. Tilgher, op, cit., p.205.
2. These words are from the stage directions of the original
edition. In the revised edition, published in 1925, the
author states that the best way to prevent the Six
Characters from being confused with the actors in the
company is to make them wear light masks cut in such a
way that eyes, nostrils and mouth are left free. “The six
characters,” he says, “must not appear as phantoms, but
as ‘created realities,’ immutable creatures of fantasy.
They are more real and consistent than the voluble
actors.”
3. A. Tilgher, op, cit., p.186.
4. A. Dukes, The Youngest Drama, p. 533. London, 1923.
5. Americo Castro has discussed the problem of Cervantes
and Pirandello in an interesting article published in La
Nación Buenos Aires, April 16th, 1924.
92
curtain by mistake, leaving the Father and the director in
front of it, before the footlights, isolated from both audience
and the “characters” and other actors. The end of the first
act comes when the director, to gather his wits, calls off
rehearsal—which is not rehearsal at all, but an equivocal
passage from life that is being translated into art by
characters who wish to express their life in dramatic form.
By refusing the momentum of plot Pirandello is left
with the formal art-problem of writing a drama about the
writing of a drama, a final purification of the nineteenth
century problem of treating life as art, or taking the art-view
of life. Like the cubist painting about the painting of a
painting, Pirandello’s play is a sort of tableau-tableau
showing the relation between actuality and its
representation. The cubists used the textures of actuality in
the form of collage to bring their art-structure into proper
focus; and they used it impromptu. Sometimes they quoted a
few legible details of objects in a frankly photographic way
so that the clichés of painting could be better contrasted
with the fictions of flat-pattern perspective. In thus avoiding
the tyranny of the literary subject they discovered what Piet
Mondrian a little later emphasized, that “the expression of
reality cannot be the same as reality.” Into his formal study
of the writing of a drama Pirandello has deliberately
inserted a good many theatrical clichés as a sort of collage:
the professional actors, whose vocation is like that of the
traditional model or lay figure used by painters, rely on all
the customary mechanisms of the stage; and the director
takes the attitude of the commercial theatre toward doing a
play. He fails entirely to mediate between the professional
troupe who are rehearsing a Pirandello script and the six
displaced characters who have blundered into the
commercial theatre from reality.
These six belong to life yet at the same time they do
not belong to it; they are like the things Picasso
“assassinated” in the interest of total representation. Their
impromptu appearance on the “legitimate” stage is a double
&posure of reality and illusion. There is also the bona fide
audience (which may or may not represent actual life). All
these levels of representation are held together in a
simultaneous perspective of transparent dramatic planes to
be read in many directions at the same time. The final test,
of course, is whether the events of life are susceptible of
being interpreted by drama anyhow, or whether the
experience of the six characters can be realized until they
appear in some artistic composition. The Boy’s suicide is a
shocking collage. We cannot say that these persons exist off
the stage; and we cannot say they live on the stage. Above
all, what is the stage? Hamlet had already raised
Pirandello’s questions about drama’s being a mere dream of
passion. The six characters, the di. rector, the actors
rehearsing Pirandello come into every sort of encounter. If
the six exist at all, they do so in some state of emergence.
When they enter, “a tenuous light surrounds them, almost as
if irradiated by them—the faint breath of their fantastic
reality.” This is their cubist iridescence of form.
The instant the six appear, the planes of representation
are displaced. The Father tries to state their situation: “The
Cubist Drama
By Wylie Sypher
When Luigi Pirandello wrote Six Characters in Search
of an Author in 1921, he called it a “comedy in the
making.” It is a very highbrow study of oscillation of
appearances in the theatre. Just as the cubist broke up the
object into various planes, or as photo-montage gave its
own sort of polyphonic vision by means of combined shorts,
so Pirandello offers a compound image in drama. He
surrenders the literary subject while the cubist is
surrendering the anecdote, and treats this theatre as a plane
intersecting art and life, explaining in his prefatory note that
“the whole complex of theatrical elements, characters and
actors, author and actor-manager or director, dramatic
critics and spectators (external or involved) present every
possible conflict.” He is concerned with the collision
between art and actuality, the theatrical crisis where the
imitation of life and life itself appear as a passage between
events on the stage and events in our existence. His play is a
research into the plural aspects of identity, and he concludes
that there are many possible levels of reality at which things
can happen. He has penetrated the old theatrical plot by
thought, much as the cubist penetrated objects, and having
conceived his problem as an encounter of art with life, he
has discovered a “way to resolve it by means of a new
perspective”—a perspective like a flat-pattern cubist
illusion.
In Six Characters the action (which is not a “play” at
all) improvises upon certain dramatic situations as being
reality—certain events in life as being art. While a company
of actors is rehearsing a play—by Pirandello himself, for the
planes of reality begin to shift at once—six members of a
family (father, mother, legitimate and illegitimate children)
enter the bare stage and ask to be allowed to act out (or
“realize”) the drama of their lives; for an author has
conceived them but not written them into any script. Theirs
is a history of a broken home caused by the mother’s
infidelity. Against the manager’s inclination, against the
inclination of the actors, the six characters try to represent
their sad lives in acted form, which at once brings the
difficulty that they cannot interpret for the professionals the
meaning of the plot they have lived and are attempting to
realize. “The drama,” explains the Father, “is in us, and we
are the drama.” In other words, theatre breaks down. The
effort of the characters to represent themselves on the stage
is finally blocked when one of the six, the unhappy Boy, in
a fit of despair, shoots himself. Some of the professional
actors take this to be an artistic climax; but it is a genuine
suicide. The Father shouts “Pretense? Reality, sir, reality!”
By this time the director does not care: “Pretense? Reality?
To hell with it all...I’ve lost a whole day over these people,
a whole day!” The ambiguity of the illusion is emphasized
when at the close of the second “act” a stage hand drops the
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drama consists finally in this: when that mother re-enters my
house, her family born outside of it, and shall we say
superimposed on the original, ends with the death of the
little girl, the tragedy of the boy, and the flight of the elder
daughter. It cannot go on, because it is foreign to its
surroundings. So after much torment, we three remain: I, the
mother, that son.” But the Son stands in the background
refusing to be identified with the rest of the six, commenting
upon the whole enterprise as being merely “Literature.” In
vain the Father protests, “Literature indeed! This is life, this
is passion.” Yet the Son will not take his part in any
theatrical representation; nor does he belong to life either.
“Mr. Manager,” he insists, “I am an ‘unrealized’ character,
dramatically speaking; and I find myself not at all at ease in
their company. Leave me out of it, I beg you.” There he is, a
figure to be fitted into the composition against his will,
adding a further difficult dimension as if he had broken
loose from the terms of the problem as Pirandello posed it.
We cannot even place him as collage.
For the Father the drama lies in taking a point of view
on events—a prehension, Whitehead would call it. He
argues, “For the drama lies all in this—in the conscience
that I have, that each one of us has. We believe this
conscience to be a single thing, but it is many-sided. There
is one for this person, and another for that. Diverse
consciences. So we have this illusion of being one person
for all, of having a personality that is unique in all our acts.
But it isn’t true. We see this when, tragically perhaps, in
something we do we are, as it were, suspended, caught up in
the air on a kind of hook.” This is the cubist suspension of
the object. When the Father sees the professional actors
trying to play his “role,” speaking his “part” in the clichés
of their art, he exclaims, getting more and more confused, “I
don’t know what to say to you. Already I begin to hear my
own words ring false, as if they had another sound.”
Pirandello invites us to examine the texture of his
drama exactly as the cubist invites us to examine the
contrasting textures in his painting, the very invitation
raising doubt about holding the mirror up to nature. The
most “natural” scene in the rehearsal comes when two of the
characters, Madame Pace and the Step-Daughter, begin to
speak so quietly and casually that the actors-who are trying
to learn the “parts”—object it’s impossible to play the scene
that way. The director agrees: “Acting is our business here.
Truth up to a certain point, but no farther.” Pirandello thus
parodies Cezanne’s approach to art: “I have not tried to
reproduce nature,” Cezanne said: “I have represented it.”
The manager wishes a single, simple illusion of reality. The
Father points Out that any such illusion makes drama only
“a kind of game.” Naturally the actors think it no game:
“We are serious actors,” they protest; they are artists. In
desperation the Father then asks, “I should like to request
you to abandon this game of art which you are accustomed
to play here with your actors, and to ask you seriously once
again: who are you?” The director, badly upset by this
remark, resents having his identity questioned by a mere
dramatic character: “A man who calls himself a character
comes and asks me who I am.” By the Father’s reply,
Pirandello hints that represented forms may be more real
than actualities: “A character, sir, may always ask a man
who he is. Because a character has really a life of his own. .
. ?‘ The reality may be an appearance; as the Father says,
“You must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it
today, since, like that of yesterday, it may prove an illusion
for you tomorrow.” Gide would agree, and T. S. Eliot, who
writes
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus.
(“Dry Savages”)
Pirandello is only characteristic of the many others in
modern theatre who have tried to break through the
boundaries between the stage and life; and besides, the
problem became a traditional one anyhow after Hamlet’s
advice to the players. This does not, however, make it less
contemporary.
With Pirandello it was almost obsessive, and coincided
with the cubist analysis of illusion and reality. Each in His
Own Way (1923)—returns to the dramatic illusion “based
upon an episode in real life.” In this play the audience takes
part, for among them are “real” persons whose lives have
been dramatized in the “play” going on behind the
footlights. These persons, objecting that “the author has
taken it from real life,” gather in the “lobby” after the first
act to attack Pirandello and to break up the performance on
the stage, which deals with a love affair between “a certain
Moreno Woman” and “Baron Nuti,” whose names have
been in the newspapers. The directions Pirandello wrote for
this interlude show how he was experimenting with
multidimensional theatre:
This scene in the lobby—Spectators coming out
of a theatre—will show what was first presented
on the stage as life itself to be a fiction of art; and
the substance of the comedy will accordingly be
pushed back, as it were, into a secondary plane of
actuality or reality. The Moreno Woman and
Baron Nuti are present in the theatre among the
spectators. Their appearance, therefore, suddenly
and violently establishes a plane of reality still
closer to real life, leaving the spectators who are
discussing the fictitious reality of the staged play
on a plane midway between. In the interlude at
the end of the second act these three planes of
reality will come into conflict with one another,
as the participants in the drama of real life attack
the participants in the comedy, the Spectators,
meantime, trying to interfere.
Pirandello “destroys” drama much as the cubists destroyed
conventional things. He will not accept as authentic “real”’
people or the cliche of the theatre any more than the cubist
accepts as authentic the “real object, the cliche of deep
perspective, the contour of volumes seen in the light of the
studio—or under sunlight either. The object, say Gleizes
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Wylie Sypher. (1960). “Cubist Drama”. Rococo to Cubism
in Art and Literature. New York: Random House, Inc.
and Metzinger, has no absolute form; it is only a passage in
possible relationships, with many relevances that are never
fixed. Except by a blunder we cannot drop the curtain on
Pirandello’s drama because there is no clear boundary
between life and art. Nor can the cubist painter isolate or
define his object. He can, however, represent its emergence
into reality.
95
clotted and perceives them for what they really are: merely
ephemeral constructions, under which the tide of life roars
unconstrained by any human illusion. In the man who has
achieved this deliverance from the forms of life, any human
construction arouses a sense of contrast which topples it
under his very eyes. There is something comical and
grievous at the same time in that crash. The crash is comical
because it lays bare the intrinsic unreality of human
constructions, but grievous too, because, however flimsy,
the demolished structure did afford man a shelter from the
mad storm of life.
In such intimate mixture of laughter and tears, of
comedy and sadness, is humor as Pirandello feels it to be
and defines it. “I see something like a labyrinth, where
through so many crisscrossing paths our soul rambles
without ever finding a way out. And in this labyrinth I see a
double herma which laughs from one face and weeps from
the other, laughs indeed from one face at the weeping of the
twin, opposite one” (see Erma Bifronte [Two-Headed
Herma], preface). Since humor is the attitude of the man
whose thought, having attained self-consciousness, has
broken through the screens of conceptual constructions to
look out on life’s abysmal tide of tumultuous incoherence, it
has to be an essentially cerebral state of mind. Humor and
cerebralism: all of Pirandello’s art is summarized in these
two words.
Therefore, antithesis is the basic law of his art. The
customary relationships of human existence are
triumphantly subverted. Among the comedies, Pensaci,
Giacomino! (Think It Over, Giacomino!) features a husband
intentionally forcing the (to him only too well known)
young lover of his wife to come back to her, while L’uomo,
La Bestia e La Virtü (Man, Beast and Virtue) shows a lover
dragging the betrayed husband back to the marriage bed.
Ma non è una cosa seria (It Can’t Be Serious) deals with
marriage as an antidote against the danger of marriage. Of
the short stories, “Da sé” (“By Himself”) presents the
supposedly dead man who traipses to the graveyard thereby
enjoying many things which are lost on quick and dead
alike. “Nené e Nini” (“Nené and Nini”) acquaints us with
two little orphans who bring ruin to a whole series of
stepfathers and stepmothers. “Canta l’epistola” (“Sing the
Epistle”) develops the motif of a mortal duel caused by the
plucking of a leaf of grass. “Ii dovere del medico” (“The
Physician’s Duty”) tells the story of a doctor who, from
sheer sense of duty, lets his patient bleed to death, then in
“Prima notte” (“First Wedding Night”) we see two
newlyweds spend their first wedding night weeping
respectively on the grave of her fiancé and of his first wife;
finally, “L’illustre estinto” (“The Illustrious Deceased”) (to
put an end to our practically inexhaustible examples) is the
tale of an illustrious deceased who gets a hidden burial by
night, like a dog, while a perfect nobody receives honors
and gifts in his place.
Dualism of Life and Form (or Construction); the
necessity for Life to sink into Form without possibly ever
being exhausted by it: here is the fundamental motif
underlying all of Pirandello’s work in such a way as to
Life Versus Form
By Adriano Tilgher
What, in Pirandello’s view, distinguishes man from the
other beings of nature? This, and only this: that man lives
and feels himself live, while the other beings of nature just
live, live purely and simply. The tree, for instance, lives
completely immersed in its own vital sense; its existence
equals the slow and dark succession of vital vicissitudes in
it; sun, moon, wind and earth surround it, but it sees and
knows nothing of them: it senses them, of course, but only
insofar as they become states of its own being, from which
it fails to distinguish itself. Since it knows nothing of
anything else, the tree knows nothing of itself as different
from anything else.
But in man, no matter how uncouth, life splits in two:
even to the most uncouth of men it is essential to be and to
know that he is to live and to know that he lives. In man life
has projected and detached from itself as its own opposite
something that Pirandello calls the feeling of life and that I
would call, in philosophically stricter terms, consciousness,
reflection, thought. In such detachment, with the attendant
delusion of assuming as objectively and externally existing
reality this mutable inner feeling of life, there lies the first
cause of human misery. For once it has detached itself from
life, the feeling of life (or consciousness as we may call it)
by filtering through the brain tends to cool off, to clarify and
idealize itself; from the particular, changeable, ephemeral
state it was, it will eventually crystallize into a general,
abstract idea (see Pirandello’s essay “L’umorjsmo” [in the
book of the same name], second edition, pp. 168ff.).
Having risen through logical abstraction to its own
second power, having become reflective thought, the feeling
of life tends to confine life within fixed boundaries, to
channel it between chosen banks, to pour it into stiff,
definitive molds: the concepts and ideals of our spirit, the
conventions, mores, traditions, and laws of society. That
causes a basic dualism. On the one hand, blind, dumb Life
will keep darkly flowing in eternal restlessness through each
moment’s renewals. On the other hand, a world of
crystallized Forms, a system of constructions, will strive to
dam up and compress that everfiowing turmoil.
“Everything, every object, every life carries with it the
penalty of its form, the pain of being so and never
otherwise, until it crumbles into ashes” (see the short story
“Candelora” [“Candlemas”]). “Every form is death. We are
all beings caught in a trap, detached from the unceasing
flux, and fixed to death” (see the short story “La trappola”
[“The Trap”]).
Most men live within those frozen forms, without even
so much as surmising that a dark, furious ocean may stir
under them. But in some men, thought, that very activity
which, lightning-like in its mystery, has split life asunder,
separates from the forms into which life’s hot flux has
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organize it into a strict unity of vision. That suffices to show
the remarkable modern relevance of this writer of ours. All
of modern philosophy, from Kant on, rises from this deep
insight into the dualism between absolutely spontaneous
Life, which” in its perennial upsurge of freedom keeps
creating the new, and the constructed Forms or molds which
tend to imprison that upsurge, with the result that Life every
time shatters those molds to dissolve them and go beyond in
its tireless creativity. The whole history of modern
philosophy is the progressive deepening of this basic
intuition into self-possessed clarity. To the eyes of an artist
like Pirandello, who lives on just such an intuition, reality
will appear dramatic at its very roots, the essence of drama
lying in the struggle/ between Life’s primal nakedness and
the garments or masks with which men must by all means
insist on clothing it. La Vita Nuda (Naked Life), Maschere
Nude (Naked Masks). The very titles of his works are
telling.
To enjoy Life in its infinite nakedness and freedom,
outside all constructed forms into which society, history,
and the events of each individual existence have channeled
its course, is impossible. Mattia Pascal tried that, who,
palming himself off as dead and changing name and aspect,
believed he could start a new life, in the enthusiasm of a
boundless liberty. He learned at his own expense that,
having cut himself off from all social forms and
conventions, he was only allowed to witness other people’s
life as a foreign spectator, without any further possibility to
mingle with it and enjoy its fullness. Since he had estranged
himself from the forms of Life, it now no longer conceded
itself to him except superficially, externally. And when,
surrendering to its call, he deluded himself that he could
plunge again into the river of Life to be enveloped by its
waves, that river rejected him, and again at his own expense
he learned that it is not possible to act as living and dead at
the same time. Thus in despair he resolved to stage a
resurrection—too late to sit down again at the banquet of
existence, in time only to see others partake of it (see the
novel Il/u Mattia Pascal [The Late Mattia Pascal]).
Of course it is possible to estrange oneself from the
forms of Life, but only on condition that one gives up
living.
To accept the Forms or constructions into which Life
has been forced; to participate in them with heartfelt belief
and yet avoid crystallizing oneself in one of them or in one
of their systems, but to retain so much spiritual fusion or
fluidity that one’s soul may go on from form to form
without finally coagulating in any, without fearing the
impurities it inevitably carries along in its ceaseless flow,
since that very flowing will purify it: here is the practical
wisdom of life. It is a wisdom of precarious value, far from
insuring perfect happiness, since some form may always
emerge to obstruct so firmly the soul streaming at white heat
that the latter fails to melt the obstacle and finally subsides
into it, stifled.
That is the case of Corrado Selmi of I Vecchi e i
Giovani (The Old and the Young), in whom Pirandello has
embodied this refreshing ideal of wisdom. Corrado has to
commit suicide one day when certain past actions of his
come to light, because these actions, for all the redeeming
freshness of life he had put in them and the good he thus
managed to spread around by their means or in their spite,
do appear vile and dishonorable to society that looks at
them from the outside.
But Selmi’s idea of practical wisdom can only be
achieved by a soul endowed with the strength to pass on
from form to form without either being imprisoned in any
one of them or losing in the passage the sustenance of its
vital illusion. That means a soul capable of attaining in itself
a balance between Life and Form and of dwelling there
contentedly. But whoever radically lives by the Pirandellian
insight that any Form must always be a limiting
determination and therefore a denial of Life (omnis
determinatio est negatio) will have only two choices left.
Either (like the Vitangelo Moscarda of Uno, Nessuno e
Centomila [One, No One and A Hundred Thousand]) he
can try and live Life in its absolute primeval nakedness,
beyond all forms and constructions, focusing on a vibrantly
fleeting present, experiencing time moment by moment,
without even thinking of time in the process for that would
mean to construe it, to give it a form and thus limit and
stifle it (This is an enactment of Berg-son’s intuitionalism,
with a timeless pure present substituted for pure duration.
Such an ideal of life is, however, attainable at the limit, i.e.,
practically unattainable.); or else, having discovered the
provisional nature of Forms along with the impossibility to
do without them, the ineluctable penalty one will eventually
have to pay for the Form that Life donned or let itself be
dressed in, one can renounce life: and that is the case of
Don Cosmo Laurentano of I Vecchi e i Giovani (The Old
and the Young). “One thing only is sad, my friends: to have
seen through the game! I mean the game of this mocking
devil who hides within each of us and has ~his fun
projecting for us as external reality what, shortly after, he
himself will expose as our own delusion, laughing at the
pains we took for it and laughing also...at our failure to
delude ourselves, since outside these delusions there is no
reality left... And so don’t complain! Do trouble yourselves
with your endeavors, without thinking that it all will lead to
no conclusion. If it does not conclude, it means that it
should not conclude, and that it is therefore useless to seek a
conclusion. We must live, that is, we must delude ourselves;
leave free play to the mocking devil within us...”
Just because the Pirandellian Weltanschauung does not
admit of one reason, of one logic, and of one law, but of as
many as there are individuals, and indeed as many for the
same individual as feeling creates in its endless variations,
each character from his own viewpoint is right, and no such
thing exists as one higher point of view from which to judge
all others Thus in the end Pirandello does not judge absolve,
or condemn any of his characters rather, his judgment is
implied in the portrayal be gives of them and of their
actions’ consequences. That makes for a firmly immanent
morality, to the absolute exclusion of any reference to
transcendent norms. For each one, the judgment is
implicitly given by the results of his actions.
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Thus, for instance, not one word of condemnation is
ever uttered by Pirandello on his many fictive women, even
though, personifying blind instinct unrestrained by reason
and thought, they seem to be crazy, amoral, conscienceless
creatures, addicted to orgies of sensual cerebralism as well
as to hangover nausea and horror of it, with sudden
yearnings for purity and motherhood. Such are Silia of Il
Gioco delle Parti (Each in His Role), Beatrice of Il Berretto
a Sonagli (Cap and Bells), Fulvia of Come Prima, Meglio
di Prima (As Well as Before, Better than Before), the
Stepdaughter of Sei Personaggi in Cerca d’Autore (Six
Characters in Search of an Author), the Murdered Woman
of the “lay mystery” All’Uscita (At the Exit), Ersilia of
Vestire gli Ignudi (Naked), all of them full of hatred against
the man each confronts (respectively Leone, Ciampa, Silvio,
the Father, the Fat Man) since he embodies what is directly
contrary to them: order, reason, pondering calm, and
prudence.
In the Pirandellian view of things, Life must needs
give itself a Form and withal not exhaust itself therein. Also,
in the human world the creator of Form is thought. Thus,
while with other artists conscious thought only accompanies
the unfolding of inner events from the outside, and throws
on them a cold superficial light, so that drama is generated
and consummated exclusively in the emotive sphere, the
possible intervention of thought never being crucial, with
Pirandello thought finds its way into every moment of
psychological becoming.
His characters justify, condemn, criticize themselves in
the very act of living through their torments; they don’t just
feel, they reason rightly or absurdly on their feelings, and in
so doing transfer them from the level of mere emotionality
to a level of higher, more truly human complexity. Man
after all is not just feeling, but also and especially thought,
and he reasons, whether rightly or absurdly, especially when
he suffers. Feelings, passions, affections are always thrown
into perspective by thought which colors and imbues them
with itself, yet by the same token it, in turn, is colored by
them and warmed by their flame. Thought here is life and
drama, and takes shape gradually through ceaseless
lacerations and contrasts. We thus have cerebralism, of
course, but one and the same with the torment and passion
of drama. Thinking thought, which is activity unfolding
through continuous struggles and wounds, places itself at
the center of art’s world: with Pirandello, dialectic becomes
poetry.
Pirandello’s art, chronologically as well as ideally
contemporary to the great idealist revolution that took place
in Italy and Europe at the beginning of this century, carries
over into art the anti-rationalism which fills modern
philosophy and is now culminating into Relativism.
Pirandello’s art is anti-rationalist not because it denies or
ignores thought to the total benefit of feeling, passion, and
affections, but rather because it installs thought at the very
center of the world as a live power fighting with the
rebellious powers of Life. Anti-rationalist (or antiintellectualist) do I call it, because it denies that a complete,
self-contained and wholly determined order of truth
preexists thought, as if the only thing left for thought itself
to do were humbly to take notice of preordained truth and
bow to it; yet it is a thought-affinning art, instinct with the
drama of thinking thought.
Thought actually leavens Life. Therefore, while for
other writers reality is massively compact and
monolithically rigid, given once for all, with Pirandello it
flakes off into several levels which in turn then endlessly
complicate one another. Not only what is commonly called
real is such, but also, and with the same right, whatever
appears to be real in the warmth of a feeling. A deeply
dreamed dream (as in the short story “La realtà del sogno”
[“The Reality of Dream”]), a memory (as in the short story
“Piuma” [“Feather”]), or a fantasy (as in the short stories,
“Se...,” [“If”], “Rimedio: La geografia” [“The Remedy:
Geography”], “II treno ha fischiato” [“The Train
Whistled”]) are as real to him who intensely lives them as
this thick world of things and people to which alone we
usually ascribe the name of reality. As a consequence, what
is real to one person may not be to another, or may be real
to still another in a different way, and what was reality to
the same man fades off in his eyes once the engendering
sentiment has failed. Jocularly, the short story “Ii
Pipistrello” (“The Bat”) tells of one such clash between
different levels of reality, and of the attendant troubles. Two plays by Pirandello above all show this living
dialectic of Spirit in action: La Ragione degli Altri (Other
People’s Point of View) and Sei Personaggi in Cerca
d’Autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author). In La
Ragione degli Altri a situation has arisen whose inner logic
by its own unfolding determines the action’s development
and leads the characters to the only admissible end. The
central character, Livia (who is fully aware of the
Situation’s logic), has broken off with her husband
Leonardo upon learning of a mistress, Elena, who has borne
him a daughter. The weary mistress would like to send her
husband back to her, and she is willing to forgive him, on
one condition, however: that Elena surrenders to her the
child to be raised as Livia’s own daughter, in the comforts
destitute Elena cannot give her. Elena took Leonardo away
from her as a husband, and she is returning him as a father;
well then, let the father either stay with his child’s mother,
or come back to his lawful wife, but with the child. To have
him back only by half, a husband with herself and a father
with the other woman, will never do. “Where the children
are, there is the home!” and Leonardo had no children from
Livia. “Two homes, that is out! I here and your daughter
there, that is out!” (Act II).
Such is the situation, of which Livia represents and
interprets the inner logic, for her feeling has risen to the
highest degree of rationality. Around her the other
characters move on different levels, all of them lower than
Livia’s: in all of them passion to some extent dominates
reason. Each of them defends a particular right of his:
Elena, as the mother she is, wants to send Leonardo back to
Livia, but to keep the child; Guglielmo, as the father-in-law,
regardless of the child, wants Leonardo to be reconciled to
his daughter Livia, or else Livia to return to her parental
98
home; Leonardo claims his right as a husband in love with
his wife again and as a father who won’t ever give up the
child. The action is a continuous dialectic, through which all
these one-sided rights and reasons gradually become aware
of their one-sidedness to yield finally to the right and reason
of Livia, which contains them all and is therefore superior to
all, for it interprets the good of the child, the strongest right
and need. Livia is of course taking her mother away from
the little girl, but she is giving her another, equally
affectionate one, along with the father, and wealth and a
name for good measure.
In La Ragione degli Altri (Other People’s Point of
View) we see a dialectic operate whereby a higher truth or
reason conquers the lower ones. In Sei Personaggi in Cerca
d’Au tore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) we see
the very dialectic of truth or illusion taking shape. In this
admirable play, which takes its cue from a motif outlined in
the short story, “La tragedia di un personaggio” (“The
Tragedy of a Character”),1 Pirandello wants to portray
scenically the laboring process whereby the riot of
phantoms born by the artist’s imagination, throbbing with
life as they no doubt are yet at first still confused, dark and
chaotically unaccomplished, aspires to a final composure in
whose encompassing harmony what had initially flashed in
the artist’s mind as faintly distinguishable splotches of color
may find the proper balance in an ample, luminous, well
organized picture.
One is born a fictional character as one is born stone,
plant, or animal, and if the reality of the character is an
illusion, any reality will likewise turn out to be an illusion
once the animating feeling has changed. Who was born a
character, then, has even more life than the so-called really
existing men, for they change in every way from day to day,
and pass and die, while the fictional character, instead, has
his own incorruptible life, eternally fixed in his nature’s
unchangeable essential traits. “Nature uses the instrument of
imagination to pursue its own creative work on a higher
level” (Act I). And once he is created, the character
detaches himself from his author, lives by himself and
imposes his will on the creator, who must follow and let him
do as he pleases. One day six characters, whom their author
had sketched and provisionally composed in an
undeveloped, unfinished scenic plot, turn to a stage
manager to propose that he allow them to act out onstage
the drama irrepressibly stirring within them.
Not all of these characters are equally achieved. Two,
the main ones (Father and Step-daughter), are very close to
accomplished artistic achievement, some other instead is
little more than brute nature, blind impression of life (the
Mother), still another (the Son) is lyrically achieved and
rebels against a dramatic enactment. These six characters in
search of an author do not, then, share the same level of
consciousness: they are the scenic realization of the several
levels of consciousness on which an artist’s imagination has
dwelt. Pirandello’s play would realize in scenic terms the
process of coalescence leading to the work of art, the
transition from life to art, from impression to intuition and
finally expression. The turmoil of scarcely sketched
phantoms who, full of an incoercible life the author gave
them and cannot withdraw, play at overpowering one
another, at securing each the center of the whole work and
drawing to themselves all the interest of the stage manager,
is very well rendered through a broken, panting dialogue.
Pirandello has deeply seen that right here, in this
eccentricity (literally meant), in this blind rushing to
develop to the bitter end each separate seminal motif lies
the whole essence of Nature or Life, what distinguishes it
from Spirit, Art, which instead is coordination, synthesis,
discipline, and thus choice and conscious sacrifice.
But this, which should be the play’s central motif and
indeed dominates it throughout Act I, finds no adequate
development in Acts II and III, where we do not see, in
scenic terms, the passage of characters from a lower to a
higher level, for they fail to proceed from confusion to
order, from chaos to artistic cosmos. Who was nature
remains nature, who was realized only lyrically remains so.
The play cannot come to light. Why? Because the son rebels
against acting his role in the play, he is not cut out for
scenes. The play fails, because instead of a coordinating
spirit the characters meet a mediocre manager who tries to
improvise it, and no work of art is to be improvised; it
cannot be a mediocre manager, with no artistic experience
or depth, a manager who sees only the so-called
requirements of theater, to set up in a few hours a play
needing no less than a painstaking elaboration. Yet this
seems to me a particular reason, devoid of universal value
and incapable of demonstrating anything. What universal
meaning can be inferred from the fact that a tradesman of
theater is unable to bring to fruition a theme left in its
inchoate phase? To lead to complete expression of
characters in whom whatever life was infused has not yet
expressed itself?
In Acts II and III the dominant motif of the play
interweaves with the one of the distortion actual life
undergoes when passing into the mirror of art (a motif
which reappears in Act I of Vestire gli Ignudi [Naked]). In
Act II there operates again the evil mirror which sends back
to the individual his own unrecognizable image. For when
they see the actors, exclusively preoccupied with the scenic
truth to be achieved, repeat their own gestures and those
words they had uttered in the urgency of unstilled passion,
the characters no longer recognize themselves, and in their
bewilderment, they burst into laughter or despair. The
mirror is in this case the art of the stage (though whatever is
said of it can be said of art in general), and when it is
reflected in it, actual life in the common sense of the word,
the life of interest and passion, appears to itself distorted
and false. But by dwelling at length on this theme,
Pirandello unknowingly transforms his characters (who
should be more or less achieved artistic phantoms) into real
beings, and by thus transferring them from the level of
imagination onto the level of actual life he splits the play at
the seams.
But there is still a third motif which interferes with the
others to the play’s detriment. Of the six characters in
search of an author, each one already knows what will
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happen to himself and to the others: they have the total
vision of their destiny. For instance, whenever the father
and the stepdaughter place themselves at a certain point of
the story and try to pick its thread up from there, there is
present to the scene the mother who already knows how it
will end, and in her foreknowledge she is induced not to
witness the action passively, but to implore that she be
spared the horrible spectacle about to take place. Thus
sentimental considerations may emerge to trouble,
tentatively, the necessary architecture of a work of art,
which has its own inner logic not to be disturbed by any
regard for the spectators’ tender hearts. But this motif
should have been developed much more deeply and with
greater emphasis. Besides, Act III after all only treads in the
footsteps of Act II, and the end of the play is quite absurd;
it’s any old epilogue, stuck there just to wind things up and
let the curtain fall.
Yet despite these structural faults the play does remain
the strongest attempt in Europe so far to realize scenically a
process of pure states of mind, by analyzing and projecting
onto the stage the various levels and phases of one stream of
consciousness. The attempt had already been made by
others in Italy, but never with such violence and daring
ambition. The drama the six characters carry inside without
yet managing to express it (as we saw in 19) is typically
Pirandellian. The hints we get of it, broken, uncorrelated
and confused as they must needs be, since they constitute a
sketch and not an accomplished work of art, still have as
much tragic power as one can imagine.2
The dangers such a theater incurs are intrinsic to its
very nature, and the word cerebra lism may sum them up
(meaning, this. time, arid intellectualistic contrivance). Of
course it cannot be denied that Pirandello’s characters look
too much alike; rather than various characters, they seem
one and the same character placed in ever different yet
identical situations. Of course the progress of Pirandellian
art moves not toward enrichment but toward the greater
deepening of one and the same Weltanschauung. As all of
Pirandello’s work tends to the theater, so all his theater
tends to one perfect work totally expressing the Pirandellian
intuition of life, like a pyramid tending to one point into
which everything underneath may converge and be
resolved.
Often the play is the belabored and gray scenic
dressing of an abstract reflection or of a situational device
which preceded and replaced dramatic vision. Figures then
become skeletal, frozen in a grimace, stuck in a mania
which is the wooden covering of a set theme. Artistic value
in those cases finds refuge entirely in the details of some
scene. Words, circumscribed in their common meaning, are
pale and deprived of imaginative radiance. The pattern will
usually consist of a weird picturesque preparation serving to
introduce abstract cogitations on a psychological or
metaphysical truth.
But there are the plays born of a lively and powerful
dramatic vision, to which abstract meditation is coeval and
not preconceived: first of all, Enrico IV (Henry IV); then Sei
Personaggi in Cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of
an Author); It Berretto a Sonagli (Cap and Bells); Cosi è
(Se Vi pare) (It is So, if You Think So); Il Piacere
dell’Onestà (The Pleasure of Honesty); and, some notches
down, Pensaci, Giacomino! (Think It Over, Giacomino!);
L’innesto (The Grafting); Come Prima, Meglio di Prima
(As Well as Before, Better than Before); Vestire gli Ignudi
(Naked). Here whatever may be wooden or skeletal is a
function of the peculiar dramatic insight, but under that
deathly cold one senses the deep subterranean throb of life
which finally breaks through; the frozen spasm will then
melt into tears. Remaining always very simple (in fact the
most sober and bare, the farthest from literary artifice, the
most truly spoken idiom ever heard on our stages), the
language of these plays is nimble, witty, juicy, bursting with
vitality; dialogue is concise, detailed, unornate, and its
fresh, relevant imagery admirably helps it to match the
sinuosities of psychological becoming.
And all the art of this great writer seems to be caught
in a magnificent ascending movement. It seems to me that
he is gradually liberating himself from the biggest flaw of
his first theatrical works: what I once called, in Voci del
Tempo (Voices of Our Time), the imbalance between the
smallness of results, all steeped in the particular, and the
metaphysical grandiosity of Pirandello’s preliminary
intentions. It’s an imbalance between the grandeur of such
intentions and the story which should have expressed them
scenically, usually a story of hopelessly pathetic petty
bourgeois creatures living in backwoods small towns, of
little boardinghouse tenants, of people catering to village
clubs, in a bleak, depressing atmosphere.
How on earth, for instance, can we recognize the
universal drama of self-knowledge as death (As Well as
Before, Better Than Before) in the story of courtesan Fulvia
who, after many years spent in shameful abjection away
from her husband’s home, returns there to contemplate
herself in the image her daughter Livia has conceived of her
through blessed ignorance of her real identity as a person or
as a mother? Or, again, in the story of State Councillor
Martino Lori, who after six years of unbelievable gullibility
wakes up to the fact that neither wife nor daughter were
ever his own? The sorrow of the wretched man in Act III of
Tutto Per Bene (All for the Best) is doubtless heartbreaking,
but to share it we must postulate on his part an absolutely
incredible, or at least unique blindness, which removes him
from our compassion into a kind of estrangement.
Surely, even in these first plays, when the meaning
Pirandello wants to squeeze from the story and the story
itself succeed in finding their harmony we get actual
masterpieces like II Berretto a Sonagli (Cap and Bells).
Where this harmony is not reached, beauty takes refuge in
the details of some scene or character, mostly in the final
scenes, when the mask drops and lays bare a sorrowing
visage. But in Six Characters and in Henry IV the
metaphysical urge shatters the puny frames which once
throttled it, and it gets free play in ampler vicissitudes. The
drama throbs with stronger life, its underlying metaphysical
torment conquers an apter expression. The motifs are still
the same, but tragedy unfolds in a higher, purer atmosphere.
100
Characters but posterior to the short story “La tragedia
di un personaggio” (“The Tragedy of a Character”).
And Pirandello has not yet said his last word. He seems now
to become increasingly aware of his original dramatic
potential.
The first progress of the Sicilian artist took place
when, having gone beyond the phase of the peasant short
story in Verga’s regional-naturalist mood, and beyond the
subsequent phase of the ironic, skeptical short story based
on manipulation of incident, and having passed from smalland large-scale fiction to the theater, he managed to
integrate dramatically those motifs which in his earlier
works of fiction lay side-to-side without substantial
correlation, like gunpowder lacking a spark to fire it. In the
production antedating The Lat~ Mattia Pascal the synthesis
of Pirandello’s special humor is not yet really achieved.
Pirandello endeavors to attain the artistic effect through a
pessimistic narrative form in Verga’s dramatic style, but
intellectual negation prevents him from sharing
wholeheartedly the anguish of his creatures. He would have
us experience as drama what in his mind has been already
overcome in a kind of philosophically resigned humor. In
this phase of his art feeling and thought are juxtaposed
rather than fused, and disturb each other.
This state of mind finds its most felicitous expression
in The Late Mattia Pascal, where sorrow is overcome in the
resigned acceptance of its absolute uselessness. After this
novel, the art of Pirandello develops in such a way as to
make ever more intimate the synthesis of its two basic
elements, so that thought will be born along with feeling as
its accompanying shadow. Live anguish gradually sheds any
ironic felicity, any expressive indifference and intermediate
nuance, to embody itself in ever leaner and more convulsed
forms. That is when Pirandellian drama rises, from an
intimate need. A second progress is now being made by the
artist, who tends to clench the expression of his authentic
dramatic center in all its purity and metaphysical
universality. The progress made to date is the sure promise
of the inevitably forthcoming masterpiece, in which
Pirandello’s vision of life will fully possess and express
itself.
So far, one thing is sure: that with Pirandello for the
first time Italian literature discovers how the spirit, far from
being the simple, two-dimensional entity it once believed, is
a chasm unfathomable by the eye, an unexplored region
sounding with strange voices, streaked by phantasmagorias,
peopled with monsters, where truth and error, reality and
make-believe, wakefulness and dream, good and evil
struggle forever tangling in the shadow of mystery.
2. The real drama of the six characters is not the drama they
carry in themselves as protagonists of a theatrical action,
but the far more original and modern drama of six
creatures who, having remained at the stage of a
confused sketch, of merely subjective virtuality in the
author’s mind, yearn to pull away from him, to live as
accomplished characters, endowed with autonomous
existence, though merely ideal, in an autonomous world,
though merely imaginary. The drama is given by the
conflict between the desperate will to be (as
accomplished characters) of the six characters and the
resistance of several obstacles (inability of the
characters to compose into a coherent art system; the
manager’s ignorance; distortion imposed on the
character by scenic interpretation, etc.). That resistance
dooms their efforts to failure and them in turn to grope
forever between being and non-being, like will-o’-thewisp8 on a dark chasm. The six characters are the drama
of possibility vainly aspiring to the actuality of being, of
virtuality vainly longing for the finality of form
(Addition to the Third Edition).
Tilgher, Adriano. (1923). “Life Versus Form. Studi Sul
teatro Contemporaneo. Rome: Libreria di Scienze e Lettere.
Notes
1. There occurs an analogous motif in Miguel de
Unamuno’s novel, Fog (Chap. ter XXXI), anterior to Six
101
author, his original intuition of the human side of art and the
procedure of the Commedia dell'arte. The Six Characters
oscillate with perfect balance between the artificial life of
glorified marionettes and the moving, stirring existence of
tragic human beings.
Pirandello's fatherly attitude towards the children of
his imagination is reflected in these new Six Characters who
clamor to be made to live. They are so overpowered by the
passion that stirs them that they beg a troupe of professional
actors to allow them to re-enact their tragedy. They claim
with emphasis and passion that, living their tragedy and
pain, they are real characters; They are completely absorbed
in their grief. In this they resemble the immortal characters
to whom truly great artists have given life, a life which is
immortal. “Man will die, the writer, an instrument of
creation, will die; but his creatures will never die and in
order to live eternally they need not possess extraordinary
qualities nor perform prodigies. Who was Sancho Panza?
Who was Don Abbondio? And yet they live because, living
germs, they had the fortune to find a fecund matrix, a
fantasy that could nurture them, make them live through
eternity." The Six Characters, too, are immortal in the fixity
of their pain. Pirandello stresses their fantastic reality as
well as their physical traits which they share with all
humanity. "A strange, most feeble, hardly perceptible light
is around them as if radiating from them: a light breath of
their fantastic reality." They possess "a certain dreamlike
lightness in which they appear as if suspended, but which
must not detract at all from the essential reality of their
forms and expressions." They are true human beings, but
they do not represent a heavy, solid, unwieldy humanity
impervious to deep feelings. Indeed, they are suspended in
the effervescence of the passionate desire to communicate
to others the burning truth which torments them within.
The Father has that uncertain and vague smile of those
whom life has baffled and disappointed. Outwardly he may
be any one of the many people we know, "rather fat, pale,
especially his wide forehead, with round blue eyes, most
lucid and penetrating; wearing light trousers and a dark
coat; speaking at times in a mellifluous tone, at times
abruptly and harshly." The Mother, as pale as wax, with
downcast eyes, and dressed in deep mourning, appears
"crushed by an intolerable weight of shame and dejection."
The Stepdaughter, eighteen years of age, is haughty, almost
impudent. "Very beautiful, she too wears mourning, but
with showy elegance." Near her are two other victims of the
tragedy: the wan Adolescent, timid, distressed, moving like
a ghost among them; and the Son, twenty-two years old,
who is tall and stiff, and looks disdainfully at them all.
There is also a child of about four, the only fresh, delicate
note in so much gloom and hatred.
The Six Characters, representing life at its highest
pitch of intensity and depth, arrive on the stage at the
moment when a troupe of professional actors are about to
rehearse a play by Pirandello, Each in His Own Role (Il
gioco delle parti). As they appear, there is in them the
afflatus of theatrical personality which urges them to go to
the actors and make the strange request of being allowed to
Art Does But Dwarf a Tragic Life
By Domenico Vittorini
In Six Characters in Search of an Author, one of the
most complex and baffling of Pirandello's plays, a stirring
dramatic action is so closely woven with keen and almost
erudite discussions of art that one is at first uncertain as to
the central idea of the work. The fact is that the motivation
of the play is essentially literary, since there run through it
various aesthetic considerations such as: Is life stronger than
art? What happens when we attempt to enclose life in the
mold of art? Is its reality increased or diminished? Does not
the artist owe the reality of his art to the torment and
anguish which have gnawed into the soul and the very flesh
of the man?
In a material sense the genesis of the play is found in a
short story entitled The Tragedy of a Character (La
tragedia di un personaggio)1 in which Pirandello in an
imaginary conversation listens to the plaint of a character
who laments the role that has been assigned to him by the
author of a book that Pirandello has just read. There is a
page taken bodily from this short story and inserted in the
play. In a more subtle and psychological sense the play is
the projection of Pirandello's long-tormented life into the
life and torment of the Six Characters.
As the title suggests, this is a play of characters. It is
pertinent at this point to inquire who is a character in
Pirandello’s mind and in what way does he differ from a
normal man and an actor. We know Hamlet, Don Quixote,
Don Abbondio, Sancho Panza. They are characters in that
they represent. a feeling, an idea, a supreme overpowering
emotion. They have lived in the flame of this idea or
emotion all through the centuries and they still live in it,
immortal in their impassioned immobility. As we look at
them they are alive in spite of their fixity. "When a
character is born," Pirandello informs us, "he acquires
immediately such an independence from his author that we
can all imagine him in situations in which the author never
though of placing him, and he assumes of his own initiative
a significance that his author never dreamt of lending him."
There are cases in life, Pirandello claims, in which man
acquires the fixity of a character. Under the pressure of the
unmerciful hand of misfortune and grief, man often reaches
a point where he becomes so closely identified with that
misfortune and grief as to be the embodiment of a
passionate state of mind which crowds out, to an absolute
exclusion, every other feeling and sentiment. Then he is a
character.
Looked at in this light the Six Characters are the
projection of that fixity in mental agony and pain which is a
typical state of mind of the central figures that Pirandello
has made live in his drama. The play is, intrinsically and
ultimately, a keen study of human. personality to which
Pirandello has accorded a most brilliant treatment. He has
called to his help his own anguish, his own experience as an
102
of D'Annunzio’s days. The "demon of experience" is just a
phrase according to the Son and to the other members of the
family. The Father rebels: "Phrases! Phrases! As if. it were
not everyone’s consolation, before a fact that cannot be
explained, before a disease that destroys us, to find a word
which says nothing and in which we find quietude."
Both Pirandello and the family question the validity of
the Father's acts because they are determined by his tortuous
reasoning and not by real sentiment. How can one believe
him when he says that he feels sorry for his wife's loneliness
and therefore sends her away to live with the secretary?
Does he not do it because he has tired of a woman with
whom he has nothing in common? Does he not mention the
"stifling atmosphere of his home life," mixing truths and lies
and believing them all true? It is useless for him to put lofty
motives into his acts after his poor and humble wife goes to
live with the other man. He continues to watch over her out
of a sense of responsibility, and, for the same reason, he is
interested in the new family of three children. When the
little girl grows up, he goes to meet her after school, taking
her gifts as if she were his own. One day the family
disappears from the town and does not return until after the
secretary's death, many years later. The Father's torment and
loneliness become greater. His Son is as if not his own; his
house is empty and barren. The Stepdaughter voices
Pirandello's revolt against the Father's attempt at
philosophizing about human acts. "How sickening, how
sickening, are all those intellectual complications, all that
philosophy that uncovers the beast and then attempts to save
it and excuse it. When we are compelled to “simplify”' life
in such a beastly manner, casting away all the “human
encumbrance of every chaste aspiration, of every pure
sentiment, ideal, duty, shame, modesty, nothing moves us to
rage and nausea more than certain remorses: crocodile
tears!"
Some years later the Father visits a bawdy house
where he finds himself face to face with the Stepdaughter,
whom he does not recognize. The arrival of the Mother
saves them from a greater disgrace. After the identification
stamps their faces and hearts with burning shame, the Father
takes the new family to his home and there they live under
an evil spell, in a light of tragic exasperation.
Each has his own tragedy, and the tragedy of one
merges with the tragedy of all. The Father refuses to have
his whole life caught in that shameful moment as if his
entire existence were summed up in that act. But he protests
in vain to the Stepdaughter, who sees in him the cause of all
her shame and misfortunes. The Adolescent is lost in that
tormented life. The Son sees half-bred intruders in them all,
and looks with cold, indifferent eyes at his Mother. She has
belonged to another man. His Father is a libertine. The Son
feels that his life depends on them "as a putrid shame which
must be hidden." The Mother's tragedy is that of any mother
who feels estranged from her son. All this shame and
misfortune is summarized in that moment in which Father
and Step-daughter find themselves face to face as man and
woman: he a man nearing sixty, she a young girl of
eighteen. Now, the Six Characters are gathered in a tragic
re-enact a scene in which, as they say, their whole life has
become crystalized. Pirandello brings into relief the prosaic
traits of the actors as contrasted with the impetuous Six
Characters. Everything is in disorder in the theatre; some
actors are smoking cigarettes, some are reading a
newspaper, others are going over their parts. Not so with the
Characters. They are all tense, in a perpetually high and
feverish tension. They have no need to rehearse their parts.
They know them, all summed up in one tragic scene. They
insist, above all, on their reality, which they contemptuously
compare with that of the actors and that of the average man.
Man thinks that he possesses an unchanging unity, while in
him are intertwined infinite personalities which are in a
constant state of change. His illusions of today prove to
have been the truths of but yesterday, the truths of today
will be the illusions of tomorrow. Not so with a character
who is fixed in a definite mold, all through eternity, if a
genius has made him live in the eternity of art. "A character
can always ask of a man who he is, because a character has
truly a life of his own marked with definite traits so that he
always is a somebody, while a man generally speaking can
be a nobody." As to actors, the reality of their lives is
separated from the content of their art. They act; they do not
live.
The story that the Six Characters relate is truly heartrending. A strange mixture of pathos and shame envelops it.
On the surface, it seems to be a drama of a divided family
which includes a woman who has first lived with her
husband by whom she had a son, and then with another man
by whom she had three more children. There is nothing
extraordinary in this, especially in modern times when
divorces create even stranger situations. But our curiosity is
aroused when we learn that all the misfortunes have been
super-induced by the tortuous mental process of the Father.
The Father is in fact an hyper-intellectual man who lacks
that fluidity of feelings and sincerity of purpose that bring
about a serene and quiet life. He speaks of the "complicated
torments of my spirit." He himself informs us that he has
always had an aspiration for a certain moral character of
life." This moral aspiration causes him to marry a woman of
the people to counteract his own intellectuality. She is
goodness and simplicity personified and lives only for her
home and her child. Her husband, obeying his customary
moral aspiration, takes the child from her and sends him to
the country to be nursed by a sturdy peasant so that he may
be in close contact with mother earth. There is in their
wealthy home the husband's secretary, a silent, shadow-like,
humble man like the wife. He and she, without even the
thought of evil, understand each other because they are
kindred souls. The husband, under the urge of his moral
sense, makes himself believe that his wife cannot be happy
with him. They are too different, he with his searching,
subjective intellect, she with her humility and silence, her
spontaneity and simplicity. He feels that the real mate for
his wife is his secretary. He provides a home for the two of
them and has them live together. He does this, urged on by
the "demon of experience," one of the demons, popularized
copies of the Greek daimon, so dear to the intellectual class
103
huddle around that scene. This scene is a flame kept alive
by hatred, rebellion, and remorse.
As the subtitle suggests, the comedy is yet to be made.
The rough copy is in them—in the Six Characters. "It is in
us, sir," announces the Father while the actors laugh. “The
drama is in us. It is we and we eager to enact it, urged on by
the passion within us.”
They present their drama to the Director. Why does he
not attempt to make of it a dramatic work? His task will be
very simple, since the characters are there before him.
Instead of being written, the work will only be transcribed,
scene by scene. As the Characters enact their tragedy, the
professional actors will observe how real characters act, and
will attempt to reproduce their acting. The Director, with
the assistance of the Six Characters, gives a certain plan to
the action to which they are to give life.
The first act presents the fashionable establishment of
Madame Pace, where elegant garments are sold, together
with the honesty and youth of poor girls. The Stepdaughter
insists that the stage furniture be the same as that in
Madame Pace’s room. The furniture is engraved in her
memory, and it disturbs her to see anything different. The
Father rebels because another person will play his part and
the various characters will receive names other than those
which they bear in real life. The Stepdaughter laughs at the
thought of the First Actress attempting to portray her
passion. The first scene is to bring together Madame Pace
and the Stepdaughter. The distance between the plane of life
and that of artistic reality is so slight that Madame Pace
arrives attached by the divine afflatus of the tragic reality
that the Six Characters are living. The Stepdaughter dashes
towards her and they talk in a low voice. The Director wants
them to talk loud enough for the audience to hear. But can
one utter aloud the words that are used to persuade a girl to
prostitute herself? Are these words said aloud in real life?
Pirandello makes Madame Pace speak in a queer mixture of
Spanish and Italian to give a complete rendering of the
actual reality. As the Mother sees her, forgetting that they
are only acting, she shouts, "Monster, monster! Assassin!
My daughter!" Reality refuses to be contained within the
artificial mold of fiction. Madame Pace leaves, and the
scene between the Father and Stepdaughter takes place. The
play pivots around this scene as the life of the Six
Characters centers around it. Pirandello lets their shame fall
drop by drop over his sorrowing but steeled heart. The two
characters are full of the impetus of reality. To them that
scene is torment and life. They go through it word by word,
stage by stage, partaking with cruel pleasure of the shame
and nausea that it exudes.
After the Father and Stepdaughter enact their parts, it
is the turn of the First Actor and First Actress to re-enact
them, but they fail miserably. How can it be otherwise when
that scene is but mimicry to them? Small wonder that they
indulge in exaggerated tones and conventional postures that
create a banal uniformity. It is but natural that the Father
and the Stepdaughter are unable to recognize themselves in
those puppets. With impatient, ill-restrained gestures, with
half amused smiles, openly with words, they express first
their astonishment, then their wonder, and finally their
disgust. Both the Director and the actors are, by eliminating
the truth,
making of that tragic scene a romantic
concoction: "Of my nausea, of all the reasons, one crueler
and viler than another, which have made this of me, have
made me just what I am, you would like to make a
sentimental, romantic concoction." The Stepdaughter wants
the truth. When she had told the man, her stepfather, that
because of mourning she could not accept a charming little
hat that he, with a lewd smile, wished to present to her, he
replied, "Good! Then let us quickly remove that little
dress." The Director does not want to have that phrase
included. He wishes to replace it by making the man
sympathetically inquire for whom she is wearing mourning.
Pirandello is disgusted with this hypocritical sentimentality.
The Director is afraid of the truth. Why hide the dregs of
human lust when man is made insensitive to everything
gentle and human, to the youthfulness of the victim, to the
nausea of her paid flesh, even to her heart bleeding for a
recent death? "I," shouts the Stepdaughter, "with the wound
of a recent death in my heart, went, you see, there behind
that screen, and with fingers that faltered with shame and
repugnance, I undid my dress, my corset."
There is a greater moral lesson in this scene than in a
hundred volumes of tiresome moralists. Pirandello does not
shrink from the truth, no matter how bitter. He wishes to
have faithfully re-enacted to the very end the scene in which
the Stepdaughter is shown standing before the man, her
head resting on his chest. In presenting the scene the
Stepdaughter wants her arms bare because "while standing
so with my head resting on him and my arms around his
neck, I saw a vein throbbing here in my arm and then, as if
only that pulsating vein awoke repugnance in me, I looked
at him wantonly and buried my head in his chest! [and
turning towards her mother] Shout, Mother, shout! [she
buries her head in the Stepfather's chest with her shoulders
hunched as if not to hear her mother's shout; then she adds
in a voice vibrating with stifled anguish] “Shout as you
shouted then!" The Mother, carried away by the power of
truth and reality, cries, "No, my daughter, my child!” [and
alter having separated her from him] “You brute, you brute,
she is my daughter! Don't you see that she is my daughter?"
"Good," exclaims the Director. "The curtain can fall right
here." The stage hand is so gripped by the reality of the
drama that he actually lowers the curtain.
The next act presents the two families living in the
home of their father a life of unspeakable tragedy that
weighs on them like a leaden cloak. The Father stares with
lucid eyes into the darkness of his studio at the heavy,
useless burden of his life. The Stepdaughter is still haughty
and arrogant; the Mother is crucified by the indifference of
her Son who continues to be silent and disdainful. The
Adolescent, meditating suicide, moves like a ghost in the
spacious and beautifully furnished rooms of his stepfather.
That thought absorbs him and destroys him. The only
delicate note is afforded by the Little Girl, who can wander
in the lovely gardens, a flower among flowers. As the act
progresses, the Little Girl is drowned in the pool which has
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been placed in the garden scene. The Adolescent stares at
her, and shoots himself.
The tragic end of the play reintroduces the original
theme of the relationship between art and life. Life enclosed
in the artificial mold of art breaks its narrow walls, sweeps
away fiction, and rules with tragedy and grief. In the wake
of a tragic life there lurks death.
Outwardly we find ourselves before a play within a
play, a situation that has often been resorted to by
playwrights. Actually it is a cleverly constructed play in
three acts in which the first act gives the background, the
second re-enacts the ghastly scene between the Father and
the Stepdaughter, and the third presents the life of the Six
Characters in the home of the Father where tragedy
overtakes them.
What makes the play difficult to understand and most
difficult to act is the fact that Pirandello has unveiled before
us his secret concern as an author, together with his
sympathy for the pitiful plight of the Six Characters.
"Authors usually hide the travails of their creation,"
departing from their custom he tells us through the lips of
the Father. He has dramatized the life of a character by
portraying him as he is when he leaps into existence in the
imagination of his creator, and what he becomes when he is
presented by professional actors. The reality of the actor's
role is fleeting. At best it lasts as long as he plays, and it
changes from one actor to another and even from day to day
in the same actor. But, in a true character, his reality is the
same forever. The rebellion of the Six Characters is that of
Pirandello, the playwright who sees the reality of his
characters offended by the interpretation of the professional
actors. Characters, as characters, live in the mind or in the
book of the author, not in the interpretation given by actors.
Pirandello has also expressed here the feeling of
resentment that an artist experiences against the limitations
of dramatic art. Why should characters utter aloud what is
meant to be a terrible secret between them? Here art offends
life, which is truth, in that, for the sake of the spectators, it
makes actors proclaim aloud what should be only
whispered. All through the play the acting of the Six
Characters is closer to real life than that of the professional
actors. There is also the resentment of the artist against his
inability to take the tangibility of life and transport it into
his art. Life as life is, and as such it needs no artistic
representation. As soon as we translate it into art we can
render but a pale reflection of it. The Father is the
spokesman for Pirandello's anti-intellectualistic trend when
he says, "You know that life is full of infinite absurdities
which have no need whatsoever of appearing verisimilar
because they are true. It is really madness to toil in doing
the contrary, that is, to invent verisimilar situations and
attempt to make them appear true." He contrasts life and art,
identifying life with the vehement, maddening passion of
the Six Characters, and voicing disdain for the art of the
actors which is but form with no real human content.
Pirandello feels that the concern of the verisimilar is a
hypocritical contrivance, centuries old, to justify the lack of
true creation. Men have created always verisimilar
situations in the hope that they may seem true.
There is in the play the clash between reality and the
perfect illusion of reality. If art is a perfect illusion of
reality, then it is not reality; indeed, the more perfect the
illusion, the more removed from reality it is. At the same
time, if art is perfect reality, it identifies itself with the
living actual reality, and it is no longer art. Pirandello has
broken the impasse by widening the boundaries of what we
call reality and giving a paramount place to imagination.
"Nature uses the instrument of human fantasy to continue,
even in a higher form, her creative work." Confronted by
the angular, solid, unwieldy, prosaic reality of material facts
and by the vain, empty life as portrayed by the artificial art
of the professional actors, he takes refuge among the Six
Characters and entrusts to them his own meaning of reality,
which is life lived with passion illuminated by fancy, made
immortal by true art.
These aesthetic considerations constitute the
background against which Pirandello has projected a highly
dramatic life. It is truly a tour de force to have been able to
keep the intellectual genesis of the play from crowding out
or weighing down the emotional element centering about
the pitiful and great figures of the Six Characters.
NOTES
1. Novelle per Un anna. Vol. IV, pp.237-46. Bemporad,
Florence, 1922.
Domenico Vittorini. (1935). “Art Does But Dwarf a tragic
Life.” The Drama of Luigi Pirandello. New York: Russell
& Russell Inc.
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