Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, The Mountain Giants (Oxford World's Classics) (3 page)

Six Characters
can be approached from many angles, most of which are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. Biographers of Pirandello have read the play as a reflection of the dramatist’s own solitude and sexual anguish after his increasingly insane wife had accused him of incest with his daughter Lietta. Readers who come to it fresh from
The Late Mattia Pascal
may read it as a metaphysical drama in which the characters who seek an author are representative modern men who no longer have the Christian God to grant them substance and significance in a post-Copernican world. But what counts in the long run is that Pirandello’s profound pessimism about man’s capacity to distinguish between reality and illusion is the essential source of all his innovations and experiments in the theatre. In the two other plays of what we now call the metatheatrical trilogy,
Each in
His Own Way
(1924) and
Tonight We Improvise
(1930), Pirandello takes his dismantling of stage illusion and dramatic convention even further, breaking down barriers not only between actor and character, but also between the actors and the audience. Even spatial and chronological dimensions are challenged when, in
Tonight We Improvise
, we are offered the choice between a number of scenes that take place simultaneously in different parts of the theatre. In all this we should not underestimate the strong element of playfulness often verging on self-parody, but the result is to force the spectator into an unprecedented awareness and examination of the complex ways in which the theatre communicates.

A young man takes part in a masquerade and chooses to impersonate the eleventh-century German emperor Henry IV. The woman he loves, Matilda, participates as the emperor’s historic enemy, Matilda, Countess of Tuscany. During the cavalcade ‘Henry’ is thrown from his horse which has been pricked by his rival Tito Belcredi. When he awakes, he really believes he is the emperor and, thanks to the generosity of his sister, is allowed to live in this illusion in a villa transformed into a medieval castle with servants as ‘privy counsellors’. Twelve years later he regains his senses, but decides to maintain the pretence of madness that grants him both the freedom to construct his own little world and a standpoint from which he can challenge the shallow assumptions on which society is based. At the beginning of the play this situation has lasted about eight years, but two recent events suggest that it is under threat: Henry’s sister has died and he has also lost his favourite privy counsellor. Belcredi, Matilda, her daughter Frida, Henry’s nephew Di Nolli, and the psychiatrist Dr Genoni arrive at the villa with a plot, devised by the doctor, to shock Henry out of his delusion by suddenly presenting him with Frida dressed exactly as her mother had been at the cavalcade twenty years earlier. The double vision of Matilda, as she is now and as she once was, will, the doctor believes, restore Henry to real time like a stopped watch that is shaken to make it start again. In the final scene, enraged by the brutality and insensitivity of this device, Henry seizes on Frida and kills Belcredi, thus confirming the others in their belief that he is indeed insane and condemning himself to live out the rest of his life as Henry IV.

Henry IV
was written in a matter of months immediately after the first performance of
Six Characters
. If, on the one hand, it develops typically Pirandellian themes and continues to explore the possibilities of metatheatre, on the other hand it seems designed to reconcile the dramatist with the audience he had just bewildered and infuriated. Instead of the amorphous ‘play in the making’ and the sense of experimental groping, we are offered the comfortingly recognizable genre of a ‘tragedy in three acts’ and the solidity of the well-made play with its exposition, complication, catastrophe, and denouement. Whereas in
Six Characters
, as the Director explains, ‘We can’t have one character … upstaging everybody else and taking over the whole scene’ (
SC
, p. 44), in
Henry IV
that is precisely what happens, with a protagonist whose dominant presence, anguished self-questioning, and feigned madness recall the most celebrated tragic hero in the history of drama.

The
Hamlet
echoes may well have influenced the way in which the play has traditionally been interpreted, with ‘Henry’ (we never learn his real name) as a sensitive victim who attracts admiration for the way he uses his corrosive intellect not only to expose the shortcomings of society but also to pose existential questions that humanity in general would prefer to ignore. We need, however, to see that if
Hamlet
is relevant to
Henry IV
, it is primarily as an ironic counterpoint. The besetting sin of Henry’s society is not so much deep-rooted corruption as sheer triviality—not murder, incest, and dynastic mayhem, but Belcredi leafing through German magazines that he cannot read, Matilda getting a fit of the giggles every time anyone looks at her with genuine sentiment, and history reduced to a fashionable masquerade. Whatever Hamlet’s perplexities, he still acts on a stage where there is no hole in the ceiling and where tragic action is ultimately possible: Henry’s noted seriousness traps him in a charade where he can only mime the tragedy of someone else. The result is that even his most terrible and lucid moments teeter on the edge of tantrums, the rage of the child who is losing patience with his own game. He is, moreover, less than clear-sighted about his own condition, as in the following passage where he addresses his privy counsellors after revealing that he is now sane:

do you know what it means to find yourself face to face with a madman? Face to face with someone who shakes the very foundations of everything you have built up in and around yourself—the very logic of all your constructions. Ah, what do you expect? Madmen construct without logic,
lucky them! Or with a logic of their own which floats around like a feather. Changing, ever-changing! Like this today, and tomorrow who knows how? You stand firm, and they no longer stand at all. (
HIV
, p. 110)

How does this apply to his own experience? Surely, in his role as Henry IV, far from being ‘changing, ever-changing’, he had been the one who stood firm and therefore could not qualify as a madman. In which case, he can hardly claim the fact that he now steps out of his role as proof of his sanity.
Henry IV
links Pirandello’s obsession with masks and role-playing with the question of what it means to define madness in a world that is now recognized as absurd; but this does not make Henry simply the sane madman who reveals the madness of the sane. That straightforward inversion would deny the flux that Pirandello regards as inherent in life. Like the polarities that govern
Six Characters
, madness and sanity keep changing sides until the terms become almost emptied of substance.

To understand the limits of Henry, whether as victim or critic of society, we need to look more closely at his antagonist Belcredi who is not quite the fop that he first appears to be. Pirandello’s stage directions warn us that we should not underestimate the real power that lies behind the languid exterior. Nobody takes him seriously, ‘
or so it seems
’; he can afford to laugh at the Marchesa Matilda’s sallies against him because ‘
What Tito Belcredi means to her only he knows
’; shrouded by the ‘
sleepy Arabian idleness
’ is ‘
the supple agility that makes him a formidable swordsman
’ (
HIV
, p. 71). He alone has the intelligence to see through the pseudo-scientific jargon of the Polonius-like Dr Genoni and the prescience to foresee the disastrous results of the plot; he alone shows some genuine understanding of how Henry’s mind works; and in the final scene he alone comes to Frida’s defence. The drama of Henry’s madness is framed by Belcredi who begins it with a prick to his rival’s horse and ends it by getting stabbed himself. In the intervening twenty years he has presumably possessed Matilda despite the shadowy existence of a husband somewhere along the line. Belcredi, in short, has all the fitness for life and the sexual potency that is lacking in Henry. Matilda tells us that Henry only chose the part of the emperor so that he could lie at her feet, ‘like Henry IV at Canossa’ (
HIV
, p. 77), a self-abasement that foreshadows some of the more embarrassing aspects of Pirandello’s own relationship with the actress Marta Abba. Henry’s archaic (Leonardo Sciascia would say Sicilian) attitude to women
allows for sainted mothers or whores, but has no room for a lover. Thus, in his role as Henry IV, he has prostitutes brought in to satisfy his sexual needs while the only two women who have ever meant anything to him, his sister and Matilda, are transformed into mother and mother-in-law respectively. In this light, it is tempting to see his seizing of Frida and stabbing of Belcredi as a last desperate effort to abandon his womb-like retreat and re-enter the arena of sexual competition. It is also a reaction to the shock of discovering that change has become impossible because form has conquered life, the Tilgherian moment that Henry himself had described:

in all good faith, the lot of us, we’ve adopted some fine fixed idea of ourselves. And yet, Monsignor, while you stand fast, holding on to your sacred vestments with both hands, here, out of your sleeves something comes slipping and slithering away like a snake without you noticing. Life, Monsignor! And it comes as a surprise when you see it suddenly take shape before you, escaping like that. There’s anger and spite against yourself; or remorse, remorse as well. (
HIV
, p. 89)

Many accounts of the play have pointed to the irony of a conclusion where Henry’s attempt to escape from the role he has assumed ends by condemning him to it. But is he really trying to rid himself of his mask? His violent action, provoked by Belcredi’s assertion ‘You’re not mad!’, is, in fact, radically ambiguous. That brutal irruption into the real world can also be seen as deriving from a last instinctive urge to withraw into the safety of official insanity. Henry, says the stage direction, is ‘
appalled at the living force of his own fiction
’ (
HIV
, p. 124) which has proved him unfit for life; and yet, as he gathers his counsellors around him and retreats behind his imperial mask, it is left to the reader or the actor to decide whether in his closing words—‘here together, here together … and for ever’—the dominant emotion is one of horror, resignation, or relief.

The Mountain Giants
, the unfinished play that Pirandello was working on at the time of his death in 1936, was conceived as the last of a trilogy of myths. Myth, as Pirandello uses the term, may be taken to mean any ideal (or ‘fiction’) which we use to give meaning to our common experience and which, precisely because it cannot ultimately be realized in concrete terms, offers a permanent motive for change.
The first play in the trilogy,
The New Colony
(1928), examines the social myth through the attempt of a group of outcasts and idealists to create a self-sufficient Utopian community; the second,
Lazarus
(1929), takes up the religious myth in the emergence of a new nature-based and dogma-free spirituality;
The Mountain Giants
deals with the myth of art.

Pirandello had been working on the play since 1929 and this unusually long gestation can be explained by a developing crisis in his relations with Italy’s Fascist regime. Disillusioned, as so many Italians were, by the failure of parliamentary democracy to fulfil the Garibaldian ideals of national unity and social justice, he had joined the party in 1924, and in public at least that adherence never wavered. There were, however, cracks beneath the surface. Mussolini failed to give full support to the dramatist’s plans for a national theatre and the Fascist aesthetic found D’Annunzio’s patriotic grandiloquence more to its taste than Pirandello’s existential questioning. Official congratulations on the award of the Nobel Prize in 1934 were more polite than enthusiastic. The clearest sign, however, that Pirandello was now out of step with the regime came with
The Fable of the Changeling Son
(1934), the verse play that he gave as a libretto to the composer Gian Francesco Malipiero. Based on Sicilian folklore, the story is that of the beautiful Son stolen away to be brought up as a prince while a deformed changeling takes his place. At the end the Son is reunited with the Mother, returns to live a humble life with her in the sunlit South, and renounces his gloomy northern kingdom in favour of the changeling. First performed in Germany, the opera was immediately banned for fear that the deformed changeling might be associated with Hitler. In Italy also performances were cancelled after Mussolini had already excised a passage that seemed to denigrate the idea of the providential Leader: ‘Believe me, change this crown of glass and paper to one of gold and precious stones, this little cape into a regal mantle, and the comic king becomes a king in earnest that you bow down before. There’s nothing else needed, just as long as you believe it’ (
MN
iv. 803). This is the same play that Countess Ilse and her company bring to the remote villa of the Scalognati at the start of
The Mountain Giants
.

Pirandello’s experience with
The Fable of the Changeling Son
did not provoke a rejection of Fascist ideology, but it did intensify his growing concern with the role of art in society as exemplified by the theatre. In a letter to Marta Abba Pirandello described the subject of
The Mountain Giants
as ‘the triumph of fantasy, the triumph of
poetry, but also the tragedy of poetry in this brutal modern world’.
⁷
Ilse and her itinerant troupe come to the magical villa of Cotrone in the hope that he will help them arrange a public performance of
The Changeling Son
, the play written by the poet who loved her and to which she has dedicated her life. Cotrone, however, urges her to remain at the villa where the play will mysteriously create itself, freed from the constraints of the theatre and the incomprehension of a philistine society. Giorgio Strehler, whose 1967 Milan production gave
The Mountain Giants
a new lease of life, saw Cotrone and Ilse as illustrating the difference between what he called pure theatre and performance theatre.
⁸
Pure theatre exists only within the magic confines of the villa, a ludic and solipsistic zone of untrammelled creativity where there is no mediating factor between the imagination and its emanations. Arising from those whom the workaday world has excluded, it can exist only in isolation from that world. Thus art becomes a hermetic activity and the excluded become the exclusive. Performance theatre, on the other hand, insists on art as communication. It cannot exist without the kind of creative imagination that, for Pirandello, is the source of all art and is embodied by Cotrone; but it seeks to harness that creativity and reconnect it with the world it has abandoned. For Ilse art is an essential dimension of humanity which should be offered to all men, whether they like it or not. In her single-minded devotion to this ideal she will suffer a death reminiscent of the archetypal performer Orpheus, battered and broken by an enraged mob.