Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, The Mountain Giants (Oxford World's Classics) Read Free Page B

rehearsal within a rehearsal’. The audience finds the Director and the Actors apparently assembled to rehearse one of Pirandello’s most successful earlier plays,
The Rules of the Game
(1918), whose Italian title,
Il giuoco delle parti
(more accurately translated as
The Game of Roles
or
Role-Playing
) reminds us that the innate theatricality of life is no new concern of the author. But whereas
The Rules of the Game
conformed to the scenic conventions of naturalist theatre—the familiar setting in a bourgeois salon and the invisible ‘fourth wall’ dividing audience from actors—
Six Characters
gives us a bare stage where the presence of Director and Stage Manager and the absence of props prevent any willing suspension of disbelief. Thus Pirandello subtly announces a thematic continuity combined with a revolutionary innovation in stagecraft.
    The rehearsal of
The Rules of the Game
is interrupted by the arrival of the Six Characters who, having been refused by a novelist, seek to impose their drama on the Director. There is, of course, nothing very original in the conceit of fictional characters seeming to take on a life independent of an author’s will, but
Six Characters
, in a typical Pirandellian move, turns the conventional scheme on its head—not an author who creates characters so alive that they escape from his control, but rather uncreated characters who need the fiat of an author in order to be given life. The idea seems to have occupied Pirandello for at least ten years. The short stories
The Tragedy of a Character
(1911,
NA
i. 816–24) and
Conversations with Characters
(1915,
NA
iii. 1138–54) already present characters who attempt to impose themselves upon the author, and a fragmentary sketch from roughly the same period gives us the Father’s visit to Madame Pace’s establishment, and mentions the Stepdaughter, the Mother, and the Son (
SP
, pp. 1256–8). By July 1917, in a letter to his son Stefano, we find Pirandello invoking
    A strange sad thing, so sad:
Six Characters in Search of an Author: A Novel in the Making
. Perhaps you can see it: six characters caught up in a terribledrama who follow me everywhere because they want to be put into a novel; an obsession; and I don’t want to hear of it and I tell them that it’s useless … and they show me their wounds and I drive them away. 6
    The process that led from initial rejection by the novelist to a partial realization by the dramatist is discussed in the 1925 Preface, written four years after the first performance of the play. He has no interest, he explains, in the portrayal of characters unless they are ‘imbued, so to say, with a distinct sense of life from which they acquire a universal significance’ (
PSC
, p. 187), and he could find no such significance in the haunting image of the Six Characters. But nor can he start out from an idea and expect it to evolve into an image; to do so would be to yield to the kind of symbolism he detests ‘in which the representation loses all spontaneous movement to become a mechanism, an allegory’ (
PSC
, p. 187). The only solution is to begin with the image and then find an appropriate artistic form in which it will be tested to see what significance, if any, it holds. The phrasing of the letter to Stefano is revealing: Pirandello may speak of a novel, but the terms ‘drama’ and ‘tragedy’ already anticipate the theatre. It is only when their struggle for realization has been transferred from the novelist’s study to the stage, when they have contended with the Director, the Actors, and all the conventions of performance, just as they contended with him, that the Six Characters will reveal their ‘universal significance’: ‘the same pangs that I myself have suffered … the illusion of mutual understanding, irremediably based on the empty abstraction of words; the multiple personality of every individual according to all the possibilities of being to be found within each one of us; and