An author in search of a theatre ARTS
HENRY TUBE
If Pirandello were still alive—he would have been a hundred on Wednesday—he might have written a particularly bitter play with him- self the central character. Time, the com- mentators and received opinion have combined to imprison him in a mask: the very mask from which his own characters are always struggling to escape. The fact that in his cen- tenary year neither the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych nor the National Theatre has put, or looks like putting, a single one of his plays into their repertory is proof
enough how tightly the mask still fits; it has been left to the BBC, on radio and television, to show that 'a great Prince in prison lies.' On Monday night BBC 2 screened Henry IV, while the Home Service played As You Desire Me, and the Third Programme promises The Rules of the Game for 7 July.
Word has got about that Pirandello's plays are about mad people—`poor fellow,' they say, 'he was married to a mad wife, what else could he write about?' Certainly the word `pazzo' is flung to and fro amongst his characters and that is perhaps enough to dazzle the simple- minded, just as the word 'jealousy' does in Othello. But Pirandello is really concerned with straitjackets, with the way that unthinking people who accept the world—or rather society —as they find it, attempt to strap it round the thinking people who can only cry out, with Henry IV: `Do you really believe you're living? All you're doing is regurgitating the life of the dead.' Each party accuses the other of being mad; but so successfully does the playwright hold the balance between them that his audience, or at least his critics, have managed to side with the thinking people against the unthinking. Not that a kind of sympathy isn't felt for poor Henry or the Six Characters in their passionate attempts to make themselves understood, but the sympathy is for their 'madness,' not their piercing sanity.
So it is that Pirandello is wheeled forward as 'cerebral,' as the apostle of 'the modern, tormented mind,' as though this was something peculiar to our century or as if since the Greeks there had ever been any drama worth the name which was not of the mind. The truth is that far from being the small master of his own crazy vineyard, with a claim on our lip- service if not our time or love, Pirandello stands firmly on the main road of European drama's Great Tradition. His much-canvassed obsession with illusion and reality is only a fresh angle on the self-awareness which the characters of Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov—to name but three—must buy so dear. Pirandello's Henry IV, having pretended to believe himself a mediaeval emperor, and knowing by the end of the play that he can never be anything else, is at one with Shakespeare's Richard II, at the end of his play, who knows that, stripped of his real kingship, 'I must nothing be'; and Richard, when he cries: 'I have no name, no title,' is on the same path out of self-deception as the heroine of As You Desire Me: 'tin corpo senza nome!' Henry, of course, has no name other than his adopted one.
But perhaps the chief cause of Pirandello's misprision in the English theatre is not his sup- posed obsession with madmen but that his characters are seen to be puppets—Italian puppets at that—and his plots ludicrous melo- dramas. The fault lies in their translation. No wonder the English theatregoer sniffs and turns away if, led to believe in the first place that he is to witness a dramatised treatise on the nature of reality, he then observes a tight circle of painfully illusory sticks, orating passionate balderdash in stick English. He is likely to feel that reality has indeed taken a sound beating. As things are, with the published translations available, it takes a knowledge of Italian or a production such as the Compagnia dei Gio- vani's Rules of the Game in last year's World Theatre Season to open one's eyes. It is not just that Pirandello's characters are minutely observed types at the same time as being written from within—that peculiar blend of irony and sympathy which is the hallmark of every great dramatist—but they are composed, grouped and set off against one another to give a rich depth to the unfolding line of the plot.
In Henry IV, the coarse student atmosphere of the four young men who attend Henry— well conveyed in this TV production by Michael Bakewell, directed by Michael Hayes —with its inner tinge of homosexuality and bullying, shades into the more menacing, be- cause more subtle, brutality of Baron Belcredi and the Marchioness Matilda. Beyond their own special relationship with Henry they bring a whiff of the whole world of nasty nobility —its clubs and parties—from which Henry was already retreating before he went mad. Beside them are placed the separate insensitivities of the doctor, through professional complacency, and the engaged couple, through youth and heredity. Henry has one non-combatant ally —the old manservant Giovanni—and his rebuke to the four young men: 'Making fun of a poor old man who plays his part out of love of me' - again echoes Richard 11 as he sits alone in the cell at Pomfret and hears music:
`Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me, For 'tis a sign of love; and love to Richard Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world.'
Alan Badel's Henry seemed almost too tough a figure ever to have had retreat forced upon him, ever to have feared anything from what- ever uncongenial elements of society, but this was an exhilarating performance, eyes flashing, words swishing like arrows hard into every mark, Ulysses at bay against the suitors in the great hall of Ithaca. Anthony Newlands, Maxine Audley and Hamilton Dyce made worthy targets for his shafts, Robert Muller's screenplay was undoubtedly English and the only major flaw came at the end, Henry repeating 'for ever ...' over and over again. It made him sound mad at last, destroying the character's cruellest moment of sanity—the realisation that his mask must become his face in earnest.
The end of As You Desire Me is, if pos- sible, more crueller. The heroine, who has as usual been labelled 'mad' by most of the rest of the cast, since she acts according to the passion of thought instead of the passions of property, lust or pusillanimity as they do, goes off, leaving in her place asiwife—it is a case of disputed identity—a real madwoman, a hideous imbecile who can utter only one name in a plaintive moan. It is a revenge more calculated and more damaging to the ranks of the un- thinking than Henry's sudden murder of Belcredi.
With this play we come up against the final charge levelled at Pirandello, that his plots are too melodramatic, too distant from ordinary experience to be taken seriously—a charge which perhaps scarcely deserves to be taken seriously itself. After all, few of us live ordinary experience in the form of a plot and those that do are certainly involved in melo- drama. What saves the play from seeming melodramatic is the dramatist's skill with character, language and scene, so that the plot, anchored at every point, cannot billow away into improbability and empty bombast. Unfor, tunately, the playwright's careful pegging may be uprooted by thoughtless acting and, though Timothy Holme's translation for Monday's radio production served, the play flew away after the first act. A pity, since Margaret Robertson held the drunken Berlin whore of the opening to a fine reckoning that she was unable to cope with the new woman of the remainder.
But until the theatre proper wakes up to what it is missing, we can only be humbly grateful to the BBC for what amounts in these austere days to a Pirandello feast. One might suggest that the Royal Court, whose latest debacle is chronicled on another page, should devote the rest of the year to as many Pirandello plays as it can afford, but it is very clear that a dramatist whose prevailing sound is the steely clash of keen mind on mind is at a disadvantage in our climate. Shakespeare has overcome it, of course, but he was in the field 300 years before Pirandello and he is often mistaken for a quiet, decent type.
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