Six Characters in Search of an Author E-Book

Luigi Pirandello

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Drama Classi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 161

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Drama Classics: The World's Great Plays at a Great Little Price Luigi Pirandello's 1921 play about the nature of theatre and the problems of theatricality, in which six characters, whose author has abandoned them mid-process, turn up at a rehearsal and demand to be played by the actors present in order to resolve their tragedy and become 'real'. This edition of Six Characters in Search of an Author, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, is translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine.

Leseprobe

DRAMA CLASSICS

SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR

by Luigi Pirandello

translated and introduced by Stephen Mulrine

NICK HERN BOOKS London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Further Reading

Key Dates

Characters

Six Characters in Search of an Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936)

Pirandello was born on 28 June 1867 in Sicily, near the coastal town of Girgenti (Agrigento) in a farmhouse known locally by the dialect word for ‘chaos’, an irony which the playwright himself, now regarded as the pioneer dramatist of modern man’s existential dilemma, did not fail to remark. Sicily at the time of Pirandello’s birth was in the process of coming to terms with the cataclysmic events of Italy’s transformation from a number of independent states into one entity, and indeed Pirandello’s father and uncles had been staunch supporters of Garibaldi, the great Italian patriot and freedom fighter, a few years earlier. The heady optimism of the Risorgimento (the movement committed to the ‘resurrection’ of Italy) quickly faded, however, as the gulf between the thriving industrialised north of the country, and the impoverished south widened. Sicily in particular suffered badly from neglect and corruption.

Sicily in Pirandello’s day was decidedly backward, its society almost feudal in character, one in which the most severe codes of public behaviour and outward respectability contrasted sharply with the primitive and often brutal reality of daily life. Extreme poverty co-existed with very substantial wealth, and the young Pirandello, whose father owned a prosperous sulphur mine, was sufficiently sensitive to be embarrassed by his own privileged position. The contrasting sights and sounds of his native Sicily had a profound impact on both him, and his later work, which constantly explores the gap between appearance and reality. The lane behind his family home, for example, was a favourite venue for duelling, a practice his own father engaged in more than once, and the corpses of those killed in defence of ‘honour’ were a familiar sight. On one occasion, a horrified Pirandello also observed a couple making love alongside a corpse in the local mortuary. While the Sicily of his early years may have been a cultural backwater, there is little doubt that such experiences were formative.

In 1886, after a brief spell in the family sulphur business, Pirandello entered the University of Palermo to study law and philosophy and, the following year, went on to continue his education first in Rome, then the University of Bonn, where he was awarded a doctorate in 1891, for a thesis on the development of his local Girgenti dialect, proof of the importance to Pirandello of his Sicilian roots. On his return to Rome in 1893, Pirandello soon became embroiled in the literary debates of the day, aligning himself with the Verismo writers, led by Luigi Capuana, dedicated to an austere naturalism, as opposed to the more rhetorical and symbolic writings of Gabriele D’Annunzio and his followers. Pirandello’s earliest published work had been a collection of poems, but he now turned to prose, and his first novel, L’Esclusa (The Outcast, 1893), was followed by a further six, over his long career, including the acknowledged masterpiece Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal, 1904), in addition to hundreds of short stories, essays and reviews, and some forty-odd plays – many of them adapted from his own prose works.

In 1894, Pirandello entered into a typically Sicilian arranged marriage with the daughter of his father’s business partner, Antonietta Portulano, a young woman of limited education, whom he scarcely knew. Over the next few years, the couple had three children, but in 1904 the collapse of the family sulphur-mining business, owing to a disastrous flood, caused Antonietta to have a nervous breakdown, from which she never fully recovered. Pirandello had already taken a lecturing post at a women’s teaching college in Rome, but now found himself forced to write for a living as well. Among his nonfiction works of this period was an important essay on humour, L’Umorismo (1908), setting out the playwright’s belief that life is in constant flux, and every attempt to control it, the manifold illusions and ‘masks’ we adopt to deny that harsh reality, are ultimately futile. Pirandello’s concept of humour, in which tragic and comic co-exist as points of view, arises from that paradox, and forms the aesthetic basis of all his mature work.

As if to prove his own thesis, while the publication of Il fu Mattia Pascal in 1904 had brought him international fame, his private life became a long drawn-out nightmare, as Antonietta’s mental state deteriorated. Pirandello’s teaching duties at the Istituto Superiore di Magisterio, where he was appointed Professor of Italian Language in 1908, were a particular source of friction, with Antonietta ceaselessly accusing him of having affairs with his female students. At her lowest ebb, she even accused him of incest with their daughter Lietta, whom she also suspected of trying to poison her. The unhappy Lietta was driven to attempt suicide in 1918, and the following year, with the agreement of their three children, Pirandello had Antonietta committed to a mental institution, where she remained until her death in 1959.

By 1916, Pirandello was already in late middle age, with a solid body of mainly prose works behind him, highly regarded both at home and abroad. He had tried his hand at drama, in his younger days, with only limited success, but his career as a dramatist was effectively launched in that year with the premières in Rome of two Sicilian dialect plays, Pensaci, Giacomino! (Think It Over, Giacomino!), and Liolà. Two more plays appeared in 1917, Cosí è (se vi pare) (Right You Are, If You Think So), and Il piacere dell’onestà (The Pleasure of Honesty). In 1918, Pirandello published a substantial collection of plays, titled Maschere nude (Naked Masks), and over the next decade devoted himself almost full-time to the theatre, with some forty-odd plays eventually to his credit, including the acknowledged masterpieces Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921), and Enrico IV (Henry IV, 1922).

By 1922, Pirandello was earning enough from royalties to resign his professorship at the Istituto, and in September 1924, along with a group of fellow-enthusiasts, known as ‘The Eleven’, he took the first step towards creating a permanent repertory theatre in Italy, modelled on companies established elsewhere in Europe. The Teatro d’Arte, with Pirandello as artistic director, and the talented Marta Abba as leading lady, was initially based in Rome, and funded by a government grant, with Mussolini’s approval. Pirandello in fact joined Mussolini’s Fascist Party in 1924, and made little secret of his admiration for Italy’s ‘strong man’, although it has been argued that he was motivated less by political conviction, than by practical necessity. The issue is a complex one, and while Pirandello at one point even distributed propaganda justifying Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, to theatre audiences in New York, it is also known that his relationship with the Fascist regime steadily worsened, as its repressive character became clear.

Despite Mussolini’s support, Pirandello’s dream of an Italian national theatre was never realised, and the Teatro d’Arte ran into financial difficulties, though it had achieved worldwide fame, during its brief life (1925-28), through a series of highly acclaimed tours to the major European cities, and South America. After the failure of the Teatro d’Arte, Pirandello went into voluntary exile first in Berlin, where he lived for a time with Marta Abba, and later in Paris. He continued to write, and in 1929 he was elected to the newly created Accademia d’Italia. International honours included the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934, though it is alleged that Mussolini, who had expected to win the Peace Prize for his attempts to bring Germany back into the European system of alliances, was not impressed. The truth of the matter is that while Mussolini clearly recognised the propaganda value of Pirandello’s support, his independent views made him an embarrassment to the regime, and the playwright’s last years were spent in increasing isolation.

Pirandello died of pneumonia in Rome on 10 December 1936, leaving precise instructions for the disposal of his mortal remains – no state funeral, just a simple cremation, and the return of his ashes to his Sicilian birthplace, which was eventually achieved in 1961. For the playwright who so compellingly dramatised the existential plight of modern man, painfully bereft of all the old certainties, not least identity, the Contrada Caos (literally ‘District of Chaos’), is a fitting resting-place.

Six Characters in Search of an Author: What Happens in the Play

As the audience enter the auditorium, they are confronted by a darkened, almost bare stage. The curtains are open, there is no scenery, apart from a piano, and a few chairs and tables, and the general impression is of a theatre during the ‘dead’ hours of daylight, into which the audience have somehow ventured by mistake. When the house lights go down, the Technician enters and begins hammering nails into a plank of wood. The noise disturbs the Stage Manager, who emerges from backstage to remonstrate with the Technician, and several actors and actresses drift into the theatre for a rehearsal of the play they are scheduled to perform that evening – Pirandello’s Rules of the Game. The Actors pass the time in casual conversation until the Director arrives, followed soon after by the Leading Lady, late as usual.

The rehearsal eventually gets under way, with the Prompter reading the directions aloud, and a debate immediately ensues between the Director and the Leading Man on the interpretation of Pirandello’s text, which neither appears to have much faith in. The rehearsal is then suddenly interrupted by the entrance, through the auditorium, of six strange individuals, a family of sorts, consisting of Father, Mother, Son, Stepdaughter, and two small children. They are in possession of a compelling story, they say, and are seeking an author to represent it. The Director at first dismisses them as lunatics, but the Father’s subtle reasoning, and the Stepdaughter’s more overtly seductive appeal gradually win the company round, and they agree to give the intruders a hearing.

The six Characters, it is revealed, are the creation of an author who originally brought them to life, but chose not to develop them any further, so that they remain in a kind of creative limbo, desperate to attain the immortality of a truly finished work of art. Their story, as it emerges piecemeal from the sometimes contradictory accounts of the Father, Mother and Stepdaughter, is an intriguing one. In the pursuit of ‘sound moral health’, as he claims, the Father married a simple peasant woman, with whom he found it impossible to communicate, and when she gave birth to a son, he had the latter sent away to be brought up in the country. Later, when he realised how much better suited his wife was to his gentle and kindhearted secretary, he persuaded the couple to go away together and begin a new life in another part of town. He continues to observe them over the years, however, and when the lovers start their own family, he takes a keen interest in his Stepdaughter, waiting outside the school gate each day to see her emerge.

After he approaches her one day with a gift, the family become alarmed and move away out of his reach, so that the Father loses all contact with them. Some years later, the secretary dies, and the Mother, now with three children to support, is driven by extreme poverty to move back into town, where she finds work as a seamstress with a certain Madame Pace, whose fashionable dress shop is in fact a brothel. Unbeknown to the Mother, in order to ensure the family’s survival, the Stepdaughter, now a young woman, is forced to entertain Madame Pace’s male clients in the shop’s infamous back room. As luck would have it, the Father is one of those clients, and the key event in the Characters’ tragic history is the encounter between him and the Stepdaughter, when his attempt to purchase her sexual services is interrupted in the nick of time by the horrified Mother. The Stepdaughter now has a hold over the Father, and uses her power to get the family into his house, where she virtually assumes control, much to the disgust of the first-born Son, who regards himself as the only legitimate heir, and the other children as bastards. This is the defining moment in the Characters’ existence, and Pirandello’s directions make that clear, recommending the use of masks to fix their expressions forever – the guilt-ridden Father, the vengeful Stepdaughter, the anguished Mother, and the resentful Son. The two younger children, who never speak, and whose fate will be revealed only later, seem permanently horrified by all that they have witnessed.

As their story unfolds, the Director is sufficiently intrigued to abandon the scheduled rehearsal, and agree to grant the Characters’ earnest wish for completion, by transcribing their experience as they re-live it on stage for the company, to create the work of art which they believe is their destiny. The Director and the Characters accordingly go backstage to draft a scenario, while the Actors, equally intrigued, if a little sceptical, enjoy a short break.

When the action resumes, the Director orders a rough approximation of Madame Pace’s back room to be set up on stage, and casts the play, assigning the key roles of Father and Stepdaughter to the Leading Man and Leading Lady. The Prompter gets ready to write out a working script in shorthand, as the Father and Stepdaughter re-enact their encounter for the Actors’ benefit. The plan immediately runs into difficulties, however, as the Characters object to the way they are to be represented, and a furious argument ensues, which calls into question the very nature of the theatrical illusion. Almost out of patience, the Director is finally about to start the rehearsal, when he realises that he has made no provision for Madame Pace. The Father then mysteriously asks the Actresses to hang up their hats and coats, in order to create a working environment, as it were, for the dressmaker, and a comically grotesque caricature of Madame Pace suddenly appears out of nowhere, to the astonishment of the Director and Actors.

The re-enactment at last gets under way, with a whispered conversation between Madame Pace and the Stepdaughter, which prompts another heated debate about theatrical conventions, whereby even whispers must be audible, and the Father prepares to make his entrance. The Mother, silently observing up to this point, can endure it no longer, and attacks Madame Pace, who is forced to leave the stage. The Father and Stepdaughter then begin to re-enact their encounter, with the Prompter rapidly transcribing their dialogue, and after a few moments, the Director instructs the Leading Lady and Leading Man to replay the scene they have just witnessed, suitably modified for the stage. When the Actors do so, drawing on the stereotypes of their art, the result strikes the Stepdaughter as so false that she bursts out laughing. The Father also objects to being misrepresented, and the rehearsal dissolves into a furious row, as the theatre professionals stand on their dignity. As far as the Stepdaughter is concerned, however, the last straw is the Director’s insistence that the true nature of the encounter, in the course of which she was persuaded to undress for the Father’s benefit, cannot be presented to a theatre audience. Like the eternally guilt-ridden Father, the Stepdaughter is fixed for all time in an implacable desire for vengeance, and she is not convinced by the Director’s plea for ensemble balance. She is determined to relive the moment as it actually happened, culminating in the Mother’s shriek of horror, when she broke in on the pair. And at the end of the Stepdaughter’s narration, when the anguished Mother does so, the Director’s excited declaration that this will be the curtain line of the first act, is misinterpreted by a stagehand as a call to lower the curtain, bringing the rehearsal to a premature conclusion.

When the curtain is raised after the interval, the stage is set for the climactic scene of the Characters’ play, with an ornamental garden pond. The Stepdaughter questions the accuracy of the setting, pointing out that some of the crucial events took place inside the house, but the Director defends his right to make changes, for practical reasons, in order to maintain the theatrical illusion. This prompts a philosophical debate between the Father and the Director, on the very nature of reality, in the course of which the Father argues that the Characters are in fact more real than the Director himself, since human life is in constant flux, ever-changing, whereas fictional characters are permanent and immutable. The Father goes on to discuss the creative process, claiming that once brought to life, characters are independent of their author, and describes the futile efforts he and the other Characters, especially the Stepdaughter, made to persuade their creator to realise them in a finished work of art.

The Director eventually overcomes the Stepdaughter’s objections to the setting, and a compromise is agreed, whereby the Little Girl is to be shown happily playing in the garden, while her brother, the silent and brooding Young Boy, will be concealed behind some shrubbery. To that end, the Director orders two small cypress trees to be lowered from the flies, along with a sky-cloth. Moonlight effects are added for atmosphere, and the stage is ready for action. Before the family’s tragedy can be concluded, however, the Son must re-enact his scene with the Mother, and this he resolutely refuses to do, claiming that he is not involved in the drama, although the Stepdaughter insists that it was his rejection of the Mother, and the latter’s obsessive need to justify her ‘abandoning’ him, her first-born, all those years ago, which brought about the tragedy. The Son even tries to leave the stage, but some mysterious force restrains him, and he ends up wrestling with the Father, who is determined to make him hear the distraught Mother’s plea for forgiveness. Before that can happen, however, the Stepdaughter organises the various elements of the forthcoming tragedy – the Little Girl playing innocently beside the pond, the strange, psychologically-damaged Young Boy, with a loaded revolver in his pocket . . .

The Son is eventually forced to re-enact the harrowing scene in the garden, during which the Little Girl is accidentally drowned in the pond, while her brother looks on from his hiding-place behind the cypresses, motionless and seemingly dumbstruck with horror. As this scene is being played out on stage, a shot rings out; the Young Boy has committed suicide, and the Characters and Actors rush to investigate. The Young Boy’s body is carried off-stage, but when the Actors return, noone can be certain whether the suicide is real or pretended, and the rehearsal ends in confusion, with the Director complaining bitterly about the time he has wasted. When he calls for the lights to be switched off, however, the backcloth is suddenly illuminated with an eerie greenish light, and the silhouettes of the Characters, with the Little Girl and Young Boy significantly absent, are projected upon it. The Father, Mother, and Son then appear from behind the backcloth and stand motionless in centre stage, as if in a trance. Lastly, the Stepdaughter emerges, bursts into raucous laughter, and rushes out through the auditorium, laughing still.

Pirandello and the Theatre