All the world's a stage

John Mortimer

Pirandello: A Biography Gaspare Giudice, translated by Alastair Hamilton (Oxford University Press £3.50). Six Dramatists in Search of a Language Andrew Kennedy (Cambridge University Press Some time in 1920 a group of Roman workmen happened to glance into the window of the house opposite their building site. What they saw so amazed them that they stopped work and stared. A solitary man with thin features, a Pointed beard, twinkling malicious eyes and dingy dark suit, a fifty three year old school teacher with something of the appearance of a classroom Mephistopheles, was shouting to himself, waving his arms and grimacing horribly. Indeed his behaviour was such that they were no doubt minded to send for a priest and report him as possessed by the devil. Had they done so the lonely man at the writing desk would have sent any Monsignor, with a good deal of scorn, about his business: for Luigi Pirandello, atheist and anti-cleric, was merely being visited by those insistent -characters in search of an author. He was writing a play.

What is interesting about this account in Signor Giudice's new biography is that it's difficult to imagine any of the realist writers of the previous decades thus demoniacally taken over. Ibsen, surely, sat calmly as he ordered his* .doomed characters to obey the strict instructions of his plot: and Chekhov can only have been smiling gently as his cast came in, like a Collection of musical instruments, as a result of his careful. orchestration. Pirandello, who is thought of as a cold and calculating intellectual, a very Einstein of the theatre, was in fact consumed with rage and terror. And well he might be, for the good middle aged professor, Whose industrious, dignified and somewhat aloof existence had always been a model of respectability, had stumbled somehow upon modern drama. The workmen opposite were watching something far more astonishing than a standard case of demoniacal possession. They

were witnessing the collapse of realism in the theatre.

The passion, of course came from the Professors Sicilian childhood and upbringing. Whilst he was being breast-fed his mother lost her milk, because of the shock caused to her by discovering that her husband had been hit twice in a revolver fight with the head of the local Mafia. Pirandello's father was the owner of a sulphur mine who later lost his money, and Young Luigi wrote that it was almost Impossible to communicate with him, try as he would. It was to the agony of the moments When nen he was trying to make contact with this aPParently morose and difficult man that

Pirandello said he owed much of his training as an artist.

Equally traumatic was the occasion when the boy Pirandello, anxious to see his first corpse, crept into a tower which was being used as a morgue. He first tripped over the feet of the dead body, and was then surprised by the rustling sound of starched petticoats. An upper class young lady had chosen that unusual spot to make love.

No doubt too much could be made of this symbolic occasion although, taken with his marriage to a young girl who later became almost murderously insane (in typical Sicilian fashion this union was decided on, long before the couple met, by the bridegroom's father), it helps to explain the close association of sex and death in Pirandello's work. His wife treated his amorous advances with unrelenting hatred and contempt, and when, late in life, Pirandello fell in love with the beautiful young actress, Marta Abba, he treated her throughout with distant courtesy and totally ignored Mussolini's advice to him "when you love a woman you don't beat about the bush, you throw her onto the sofa." The sofa, in Pirandello's mind, was far too much like the coffin.

Sr Giudice is no doubt right when he finds the true key to Pirandello in his rebellion against his father. It was no open revolt, the life of the school teacher who kept his family by sitting up all night writing short stories was, on the face of it, supremely conventional. But as with many secretly mutinous children Pirandello settled for the kindof intellectual anarchism which is never a bad standpoint for the creative artist.

And by 1920 the time was right for a dramatic revolution. The Great War had made all conventional plots, depending on logic and reasonable motivation, ridiculous. Killing, death and separation on the most massive scale the world had ever known were apparently senseless. If the War had a plot everyone had forgotten it long before the play was over. The most serious event for a century was also "a transcendental farce", a phrase which Pirandello used in an article he wrote in 1920. He spoke of the only true reality "which can smile at the vain appearance of the world. It stipulates it, but it can also destroy it; it does not have to take its own creations seriously....

The farce of the grotesque includes its parody and its caricature in the very same tragedy, not as superimposed elements but as its own shadow, a clumsy shadow of every tragic gesture." So Pirandello's characters are full of Sicilian passion, but their affirmations, their beliefs and their tragedies have no objective truth and only have relevance in each individual's private world. "Right you are (if you think so)", the title of one of his plays stands for his entire view of life. "In love you are (if you think so)." Or "Believe you do (if you think so)". Our laws and theories are no more lasting or valid than our passions, and things only are because they seem to be.

For the illustration of these views the theatre is of course, the ideal, the unsurpassable medium. The actor is only a king because he thinks so, arid persuades the audience to agree. The stage is only a castle, a bedroom, a churchyard, because our passions require such a location and not because that dusty spotlit square has any real connection with Elsinore. All tragedy, and all comedy also, lies in the passionately held but inapposite nature of our dreams. Macbeth imagines a world where he is king, Hamlet a world in which he can act decisively, and the hero of an Aldwych farce one in which he can slip away for a weekend in Brighton without his wife being any .the wiser. But these dramas presuppose a firm reality against which their heroes can batter their brains or bark their shins. For Pirandello there is no central reality. Hamlet is really mad to anyone who thinks so. The Characters enter with passion to find an author to whom they may become attached; but the author, like the unavailable father or the non-existent Catholic God, is nowhere except in his Characters' imaginations. Small wonder that in that solitary study in Rome the workmen saw Pirandello's creations giving him such a rough time of it.

Brilliantly effective in the theatre such beliefs in the relativity of truth are apt to become misleading in the world, where it is safer to assume, against all reason, some objective reality. Pirandello, worshipping passion from afar and considering the forms it took more or less unimportant, became an admirer of Mussolini. He called the dictator, typically, a "Great Man of the Theatre" because of the way he staged The Conquest of Abyssinia. Pirandello's strange brush with the fantasy of fascism would make a fascinating Pirandello play: it already provides a grotesque and farcical chapter of his biography.

Guidice's study of Pirandello and Mussolini is well told and documented, as are the accounts of his childhood and tragic marriage. There are rather too many opening nights, events which seem to have lost importance by the next morning and to be totally uninteresting fifty years later. And I would have liked a fuller description of the plays which are less well known here than in Italy. But there are many vivid moments and I enjoyed the discovery that during any critical discussion of his plays, none of which took him more than two or three weeks to write, Pirandello would remain totally silent, apparently uninterested, and playing patience. He would have put up a lot of red Queens during any discussion such as Andrew Ken nedy's learned disquisition on the theatrical language of six modern dramatists ranging from Shaw to Arden. I am greatly in favour of the theatre being regarded as a literary art and not a place for actors to mug around, and there is no subject more fascinating to me than that of spoken dialogue. But I didn't get very far with Mr Kennedy, senior lecturer in English at the University of Bergen.

-The inward looking theatre goes with an infolding language within the language;

against this may be set a new theatricality which extends and externalises, breeding composite languages out'of old ones, as style breeds style in Malraux's Mute Imaginaire." All this may be very useful for those anxious to pass exams, particularly in the University of Bergen. I prefer to remember a frightened boy who heard a petticoat rustle in the morgue, an old teacher shouting back at his Characters, and a supreme dramatist who started a game of patience .when anyone discussed "The Drama."

John Mortimer is a barrister and dramatist whose plays include Come As You Are, and A Voyage Round My Father