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Introduction:
The importance of Pirandello in the history of world theatre is
undeniable. Although he wrote most of his plays in the
beginning of the last century, they are still
successfully performed and not only in Italy.
Pirandello’s theatre reflects what Pirandello’s literary production
deals with. The main themes of Pirandello’s theatre
are noticeable in most of Pirandello’s novels and
short stories (see “Main themes of “Quando
si
comprende” by Luca Forte) so much that some short
stories became theatre plays( like "Pensaci Giacomino"
and "Così è se vi pare").
Only after 1916 Pirandello’s main activity became theatre; we can say
that Pirandello began to write intensively theatre plays
when he realized it was the best way to express the
difficulties of living in a reality that every
individual feels in a different way. According to
Pirandello, art is reflection and its best expression is
humour (see "Pirandello's Humour") ; theatre naturally
represents the conflict of opinions through which all
the false myths collapse.
Periodisation:
Pirandello’s theatrical production is divisible in three parts:
approximately from 1909 to 1916 he wrote principally
comedies mostly in Sicilian dialect, set in the island,
like “Lùmie di Sicilia”, “Liolà”, “La
Patente”. Then
he created what we actually consider his masterpieces.
“Cosi è, se vi pare”, ”Il piacere dell’onestà”,
“Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore”, “Enrco IV”
all belong to this artistic period, and all reflect the
Pirandellian conception of life.
In his last drama productions he uses fantasy and wonder like he never did
before to create modern myths with positive idealities.
In this essay we are going to focus on Pirandello’s masterpieces.
Right you are (Così è, se vi pare - 1917)
One of the most developed Pirandellian themes is the background
assumption of this comedy: nobody will ever have a
unique and unquestionable vision of reality. Nobody has
got an a priori essence and every man becomes a person
just as a consequence of other people’s opinions. Every
man is as he is depicted by the others, and that is why
every man can be as many different masks as the
people he gets in touch with.
Berretto
a sonagli(1917)
This comedy is a story of infidelity and scandal, one of the best examples of Italian theatre. In this play every
character is a “puppet” and has got his own
personality to show to everybody. It’s a question of "look". Everybody wants “its own puppet” to be
respected, though they are aware they do not deserve this respect. This is the core of the famous speech
of Ciampa in the fourth act of the comedy. It is one of
the most popular plays of Pirandello.
Pleasure Of Honesty (Il Piacere dell'onestà - 1917)
In this comedy Pirandello starts from an
apparently insignificant story (a man
has to find a husband for his lover that is pregnant to
give a name to the child she is expecting. An
impoverished aristocrat
because of
his gambling debts, Baldovino, is chosen for the
purpose), then he enlarges it and
reaches the tragedy. It is a
play about men’s
impossibility to live
their lives by following abstract
concepts. Baldovino accepts the marriage for the
pleasure of representing honesty, but then brings his
righteous behaviour to extreme consequences. In the end
of the play his feelings revolt
against all that and he gets his life back .
Six
characters in search of an author (Sei
personaggi in cerca d'autore
- 1921)
This comedy is, for (almost) unanimous judgment from the literary critics,
his masterpiece, and perhaps one of the best plays of
the Italian theatre of 20th century. In this
work the author, using the “theatre in the theatre”
trick gives a complex and successful representation of
the human condition and of the way he meant the
relationship between playwright and actors. The six characters
ask the
lead-actor to be drawn from their condition
- they have been only half-created by the author- to see
their tragedy performed and then they don’t recognize themselves in the actors that
try to play it: they are an exceptional reading key of
the whole Pirandellian theatre.
Henry
IV
(Enrico IV
- 1922)
The protagonist
of this drama is a young aristocrat that during a
masquerade,
disguised as Henry IV, after a horse
accident he hits his head and gets crazy. For twelve
years, he lives
pretending to be Henry IV. But, after
a long time, suddenly he retrieves the reason he had
lost and he realizes what
has
happened in his period of
craziness: life
had gone
on and he had been excluded from it, so he chooses to
keep to live as an historical character protected
from the
case.
Conclusions
Trying to extrapolate what is the final meaning of Pirandello's theatre, we
can’t avoid to mention his own declarations.
Pirandello began writing for the theatre with a deep moral
conviction: a play is an effective instrument
the writer uses to reveal to men the “awful truth”
he painfully gets to. So everyone getting in contact
with his theatre (be it an actor, a spectator or a reader)
watches himself
with curiosity very often deformed and full of greatly enlarged faults. That’s the main purpose of Pirandello
in his theatre. So we can understand that his plays are
universally comprehensible, because every man has got
the same existential problems. So comprehensible that
some critics believe that it was only through
Pirandello’s playwright activity that his art, and the
whole Italian modern literature, successfully became
European and “global”.
Limits
However the critics found some limits in Pirandello’s literature (and
in his theatre, of course); these limits are intrinsic,
inseparable from his literary production: sometimes his
works are really made up of this matter.
The characteristics most usually considered objectionable are mainly his
so called “cerebralism”, the ruthless distruction of
every confidence, the unilaterality of his conception
and his pedagogic style. Despite all, he was (and he is
still) admired for his capacity to universally interpret the anxiety every modern man has.
by Giacomo Cirillo,
Lorenzo Sbrighi, and Francesco Fraiegari
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