Luigi Pirandello - Plays: Vol 1

Plays

Volume One

Luigi Pirandello

ALMA CLASSICS

alma classics ltd

Hogarth House

32-34 Paradise Road

Richmond

Surrey TW9 1SE

United Kingdom

www.almaclassics.com

The translations (now revised for the present edition) of Six Characters in Search of an Author , As You Desire Me , Clothe the Naked , Think It Over, Giacomino! , Lazarus , Limes from Sicily and The Man with the Flower in His Mouth first published in Pirandellos Collected Plays (Vols. 14) by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd, 19871996

First published by Alma Classics Ltd (previously Oneworld Classics Ltd) in 2011

This new edition first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2015

All the translations contained in this volume the relevant translators

Cover image: Peppe Aveni

isbn : 978-1-84749-469-6

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Plays

Volume One

Introduction

Surprisingly little seems to be known in Britain about Luigi Pirandello, who died in 1946, and of whom The Times said: It is largely to him that the theatre owes liberation, for good or ill, from what Desmond MacCarthy called the inevitable limitations of the modern drama, the falsifications which result from cramming scenes into acts and tying incidents down to times and places. Only a few of his major works have been published in English to date, some of which are not direct translations, but the result of British or American writers who neither spoke nor understood Italian, who commissioned a literal translation, and then reconstructed the authors statements in the light in which they themselves saw them.

Pirandello was born at Caos in Sicily in 1867. He studied letters at Palermo University and later in Rome. For many years he taught at a girls school, living in comparative poverty and growing steadily unhappier in his work. His marriage ended in disaster when his wife became mentally unbalanced and had to be sent to an institution. His literary efforts began with poems and short stories, and later he wrote novels. He did not start writing seriously for the theatre until 1915 at the age of forty-eight, after which he gave to the stage no fewer than forty-three plays in Italian and several in Sicilian.

For a number of years he was in charge of his own theatrical company which had as its leaders Ruggero Ruggeri and Marta Abba, and many of his plays were written as tailor-made articles for them and for the rest of his group. Despite the severe lack of finance, he never succumbed to writing plays which conformed to the style and idiom of the more successful dramatists of his time. He deliberately created anti-heroes. His protagonists are like soldiers who have been beaten in their first battle and have no belief in the future!

Having lost a considerable sum of money with his own company, and become greatly disillusioned because his native Italy considered him too original for the box office (often his plays were translated and performed abroad long before they saw the footlights in their own language) and already in his seventies, Pirandello suddenly announced that Europe had grown too old for him, that it could boast of only one other young brain (Bernard Shaw) and that he would take himself off to a country of new ideas and then journeyed to America.

Pirandello was a fiery, passionate man who had reached his own particular outlook on life through adversity and years of tortured wondering at the true significance of reality. His primary concern was with the illusions and self-deceptions of mankind and the nature of identity. His works grew from his own torment, and through his genius they came to speak for all the tormented and potentially to all the tormented, that is to all men. He delighted in creating an unusual but logical situation developing it seemingly illogically and by continually tossing the coin until both sides had been clearly revealed, managing to convince his audience that his unconventional and not very credible treatment was in fact wholly logical and convincing.

Many of his plays were written in the style known to the Italians as grottesco : comedies developed tragically or tragedies developed comically. Nearly all spring from intensely dramatic situations situations in which passion, love and tragedy make their presence strongly felt.

In Britain theatre productions of his works have been few and far between, and this may be due partly to the fact that directors and adaptors sometimes assume he is going to be far too difficult for the audience so it will be up to us to put that right! By approaching the text with the preconceived notion that a particular interpretation must shine like a beacon between author and audience in order to elucidate matters, one often succeeds merely in confusing the issue further. There have been examples of this authors brilliantly cynical humour, behind whose mask we are meant to see our own selves, being deliberately distorted to the level of unacceptable farce in an attempt to clarify.

If Pirandellos plays were approached more simply, were permitted to play themselves more and did not have the Latin sentiment and human compassion ironed out by their interpreters, perhaps the fear that one may not be able to follow him would be removed from the minds of many of our theatregoers. It would be found that his works, as Kenneth Tynan once wrote: wear their fifty-odd years as if they were swaddling clothes, and might then find themselves a regular niche in our commercial theatre.

Robert Rietti

Six Characters in Search of an Author

Sei personaggi in cerca dautore (1921)

Translated by Felicity Firth

Pirandellos Introduction

For a great many years now, though it seems no time at all, I have been assisted in my artistic labours by a sprightly young helpmate, whose work remains as fresh today as when she first entered my service.

Her name is Imagination.

There is something malicious and subversive about her, as her preference for dressing in black might suggest; indeed, her style is generally felt to be bizarre. What people are less ready to believe is that in everything she does there is a seriousness of purpose and an unvarying method. She delves into her pocket and brings out a jesters jingling cap, rams it onto her flaming coxcomb of a head and is gone. She is off to somewhere different every day. Her great delight is to search out the worlds unhappiest people and to bring them home for me to turn into stories and novels and plays; men, women and children who have got themselves into every conceivable kind of fix, whose plans have miscarried and whose hopes have been betrayed; people, in fact, who are often very disturbing to deal with.

Well, some years ago, this assistant, this Imagination of mine, had the regrettable inspiration, or it could have been the ill-fated whim, to bring to my door an entire family; where or how she got hold of them I have no idea, but she reckoned that their story would furnish me with a subject for a magnificent novel.

I found myself confronted by a man of about fifty, wearing a dark jacket and light trousers, grim-visaged, with a look of irritability and humiliation in his eyes. With him was a poor woman in widows weeds holding two children by the hand, a four-year-old girl on one side and a boy of not much more than ten on the other. Next came a rather loud and immodest young woman, also in black, which in her case contrived to look vulgarly dressy and suggestive. She was a-quiver with a brittle, biting anger, clearly directed against the mortified old man and against a youth of about twenty who stood detached from the others, wrapped up in himself, apparently contemptuous of the whole party. So here they were, the Six Characters, just as they appear on the stage at the beginning of the play. And they set about telling me the whole sad series of events, partly in turns, but often speaking all together, cutting in on each other, shouting each other down. They yelled their explanations at me, flung their unruly passions in my face, just as they do in the play with the luckless Producer.