No apology is necessary for offering to readers plays which critics, with singular unanimity, have called some of the most original productions seen on the modern stage. In less than a year's time, such plays as "Six Characters in Search of an Author" have won a distinguished place in the dramatic literature of the Western world, attracting audiences and engaging intellects far removed from the particular influences which made of it a season's sensation in Italy.
Yet the word "original" is not enough, unless we embrace under that characterization qualities far richer than those normally credited to the "trick" play. Pirandello's works are something more than the unusually ingenious variation of the "play within a play." They are something more than a new twist given to the "dream character" made familiar by the contemporary Italian grotesques. They are dramatizations of the artistic process itself, in relation to the problem of reality and unreality which has engaged him in one way or another for more than twenty years.
This point as against those observers who have tried to see his plays as ironical satire of the commercial drama, is at best mixed, more or less artificially, with a rather obvious philosophy of neo-idealism. Point of fact… no such mixture exists. The blend is organic. The object of Pirandello's bitter irony is not the stage-manager, nor the theatrical producer, nor even the dramatic critic: , it is the dramatist; it is the artist; it is, in the end, life itself.
The human soul presents no mysteries to those who have been thoroughly grounded in the science of Freud. But in spite of psycho-analysis a few Hamlets still survive. Pirandello is one of them.
What are people really like? In the business of everyday life, nothing is more common than the categorical judgment sweeping and assured in its affirmatives. But as we cut a little deeply into the living matter of the spirit, the problem becomes more complicated. Do we ever understand the whole motivation of an action—not in others only but even in ourselves?
Oh, yes, there are people who know. . . . The State knows, with its laws and its procedures. And society knows, with its conventions. And individuals know, with their formulas for conduct often cannily applied with reference to interest.—The ironical, element, as everyone has noted, is fundamental in Pirandello.
Apart from works in his earlier manner (realistic pictures from Southern Italian life, including such gems as "Sicilian Limes"), Pirandello's most distinctive productions have dealt with this general theme. No one of them, indeed, exhausts it. And how could this be otherwise? Pirandello, approaching the sixties, to be sure, is nevertheless in spirit a man of the younger Italian generation, which, trained by Croce and Gentile, has "learned how to think." But however great his delight in playing with "actual idealism," he knows the difference between a drama and a philosophical dissertation. His plays are situations embodying conclusions, simple, or indeed "obvious" in their convincingness. They must be taken as a whole—if one would look for a full statement of Pirandello's "thought."
A "thought," moreover, may or may not invite us to profound reflection. Enough for the lover of the theatre is the fact that Pirandello derives his most interesting dramatic possibilities from it.
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