THE THEATRE
"RELATIVITY" ON THE STAGE
THE PLAYS OF SIGNOR PIRANDELLO.
THE celebrated Pirandello has come and gone. Thanks to Mr. C. B. Cochran, we have seen four of his plays pCrformed, by his own company, at the New Oxford Theatre. We have heard him explain them, invite questions about them, answer the questions in person or through a dazed interpreter, and defend them, in deprecatory speeches, with a " smiling humility " which, according to him, " usually has the effect of adding to the exasperation they are intended to provoke." " Let it be henceforth understood that, at the end of every act of the irritating comedies of Pirandello, there must be argument and opposition." And if there should be none in the audience ? If, on the contrary—" irritating " thought— the audience should accept it all in a puzzled acquiescence ? Why, then, opposition and argument must be artificially
simulated on the stage. • The play from which the quoted words are taken, Each in His Own Way, has no precise length assigned to it in the stage directions—" on account of the unpleasant incidents that will probably occur during the representation." It is in " two or *MothercraJ,. (National League for Health, Maternity and Child Welfare, 117 Piccadilly, W.I. Fifth edition, revised and enlarged, • 1825. Price 4s. 6d. net.) three " acts, interrupted, like Fanny's First Play, by a chorus of comment, in which the audience, the dramatic critics, the actors, and the libelled originals of the principal characters bustle about, argue and quarrel, until the leading actor has to announce that the third act cannot be given. This is signifi- cant and disquieting. It suggests that, like all the thesis- playwrights, from the younger Dumas and Ibsen, to Brieux and Shaw, Pirandello has a message." Thos.e who have a message generally forget about a play ; that is, they subordin- ate character to ideas trumpeted through the mouths of author-replacing raisonneurs. We knew that Pirandello had " views " about appearance and reality, truth and illusion, the one and the many, personality divisible and " undulating." Does he use ideas to exhibit new aspects of character and emotion ? Or does he submerge character in a torrent of disquisition ? He stands or falls by that test.
Sometimes he falls. Often he stands. His danger and difficulty are best illustrated perhaps by Six Characters in Search of an Author. The six characters are " spirits unfor- tunate" who wander separated from the brain of their creator, seeking to acquire the life he had begun to give them, clamour- ing to live over again the dark drama in which their happiness was lost. If, as the play progresses, they are to acquire for the audience the reality in which they themselves so poignantly believe, they must not be visibly conscious of their own " philosophical position." They must not know themselves as fictions. For them, as gradually emergent creatures taking flesh under our eyes, the important thing must be the Tosco dramma, the sinister tragedy, in which they dream that they have taken part—or, rather, in which they hare taken part, because they dream that they have. And so long as Pirandello fixes their hallucinated memories upon that real and unreal tragedy, they live for us ; and he gets his full effect out of the contrast between their intense conviction and the external approach to them of the actors who undertake to represent them, though they need no alien representation. The moment he begins to make them argue about facts, reason, sentiment, fiction and reality—instead of leaving us to draw our own con- clusions from the contrasts indicated—he begins to be merely a third-rate metaphysician who asserts through the mouth of the Father in this play that imaginal y characters have a change- less existence denied to real beings, though we know that they change with those who contemplate them, and that Shylock (suppose) is a tragic figure to us ; comic, perhaps, to the Elizabethans. His creatures, in fact, tend to be too self- conscious to be sufficiently human. They are often personified notions.
Thus he gives us (II Giuoco delle Parti) the contrast Letween reason and instinct, personified in a husband (all reason) and a wife (all instinct) ; the contrast between fact and imagination (Six Characters); the contrast between ugly reality and its clothing " by beautiful lies (Clothing the Naked) ; the contrast between a timeless delusion, volun- tarily maintained, and the fluctuating life about it (Henry IV.). In these plays the characters either " create their own truth," as do the gossips who try to solve the mystery of their neigh- bours' supposed madness in Cosi e; or else, like the wife in Signora Morli, it is created for them by others, as she is neatly divided into two by her varying environment. Their existences are indeed built up for them by other people, as much as by themselves. , They are the slaves of opinion. We rarely look straight at them. We see them reflected.
What, for example, so terribly perturbs Palma Lori, in All for the Best, is the thought that others imagined him to know that his supposed daughter is not his own. The mother, Donn' Anna, in The Life I Gave—one of the most moving of all the plays—cares not so much that her son is taken from her, as that another woman has given him a greater reality than her own, which was reminiscent and related to his far-off childhood. The hero of Il Piacere dell' Onesta insists that on the opinion of those about him will depend the success of his pose as complacent husband and supposed father of another man's child. Ersilia Drei dies " naked," not because she lacks worldly protection, but because her voluntary projection of herself is discovered to be false. Therefore she is nothing ; since she knows that we are made up of the illusions we build about ourselves, or persuade others to build about us. In fact, poor Ersilia is a victim of the malady of Bovarysm, as that most
entertaining of French philosophers, Jules de Gaultier, calls the mania for " imagining ourselves to be other than we are." Certainly : Madame Bovary was a Pirandellian sans le savoir.
But the greatest exponent of the art was Henry IV., who goes mad, recovers, and realizes that his mediaeval mas- querade will give him the sense of immobility, while all shifts about him. He will evade the perpetual flux in which others toil. They are for him mere uncreative fools who do not know that peace and youth hide under the selected mask. A wise and also, evidently, a wealthy man, who has relatives and lackeys about him to humour his dream ! For " creating one's own truth," may be an expensive habit, if carried to that extreme. One's friends and enemies will respond with counter-truths. The conflicting truths will clash and produce the typical crisis. And often, I fear, in the exciting process, under the vacillating Pirandellian lights, average truth of humanity vanishes away. The dramatist's sense of " rela- tivity " is so tyrannical that he will not endow his creatures with the consistency in which he does not believe. He will not confer a recognisable solidity upon them. And so, though the order of ideas with which he so amusingly plays, is presumably more lasting than those of the merely municipal theorists—as Time and Space may concern us longer than the problem of better drainage for suburban districts—these " irritating " comedies may no longer provoke, once the " point of view " that made them has become familiar. How- ever that may be, we owe to the " amiable " Signor Pirandello an appreciable relief from the stale commonplaces of current dramatic production. Let us therefore salute him with
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