Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)

“Il turno” è datato 1902, la struttura è quella di un racconto lungo in quanto in pochissime pagine Pirandello riesce a concentrare un storia di intrecci, matrimoni combinati, matrimoni annullati, matrimoni sperati e sofferti. Una storia che mette in vetrina sotterfugi, intrighi, egoismi di una società borghese di provincia, dove ai sentimenti e alle passioni vengono anteposti gli interessi e le speculazioni; ma la penna di Pirandello non si limita a portare in superficie le melme show more dell'animo o le consuetudini del tempo, ma vuole mostrare al lettore cosa avviene quando la volontà dell'uomo si incontra e si scontra con il destino. Un destino beffardo, ospite indesiderato che scompagina ogni piano, spazzando via sogni e speranze.

I personaggi sono un capolavoro, una galleria umana tinteggiata di grottesco, colta con finezza psicologica sia nella solitudine dell'animo sia nel rapportarsi agli altri, in famiglia e in società; lo sfaccendato, il furbacchione, l'indolente, l'egoista, l'approfittatore si incrociano tessendo la tela di una storia il cui succo umoristico sfocia nella sconfitta. Uomini che si affannano alla costruzione di un castello dorato, progettando e mettendo in porto azioni mirate al raggiungimento di un risultato, di un profitto e di un agio; eppoi gli stessi spazzati via dai venti impetuosi del destino, che manovra gli eventi in maniera imprevedibile.

Una egregia rappresentazione di un gioco degli equivoci e degli effetti contrari, condotto dalla penna acuta e umoristica di Pirandello. Un romanzo che nonostante il secolo che si porta sulle spalle non perde smalto e freschezza, restando una lettura moderna e godibile. show less

Pirandello was a complex and bizarre man when it came to penning down personality narrations. His works on theatrical post-modern genres are not only mesmerizing but quite baffling at times.

Henry IV is an engrossing masquerade about an actor/protagonist of a play who goes crazy after being knocked off his horse. The actor then wanders in a deluded world owing to the persona of Henry IV (a character he used to play before the ill-fated mishap) spanning over twelve years after the fall. Thus show more he then prefers to reside in his castle with his private counselors similar to the Henry IV of Germany. The entirety of the play consists of other characters trying to unmask the assumed persona to reveal the reality of a calamity.




**Actors in session**

Who are we? Why are we afraid of madmen? (To be noted that the term “madmen” restricts to exposing the genuineness of a character and not those preposterous junkies who play Nostradamus on street corners). When do authenticity of an individual halts and a façade is established which we perceive as reality? These questions are synonymous with Pirandello and his idea of existential artistry. Henry IV screams that he is not mad and argues as to why the world is afraid of “madmen”? Madness speaks the truth, exposes veracity that a conscious mind veils under the folds of obligatory societal façade; so asserts Pirandello. I do not know how legitimate the actor portraying Henry IV is in his actions, nevertheless I agree with Pirandello. As rational folks we premeditate our measures meticulously supervising our words and actions limiting inadvertent buffoonery. The slightest example would be people calling me a crazy bitch when my guttermouth precedes my mannerism. And that happens a lot. So am I a mad woman or is just that my courteous mask decides to shove up where it hurts the most. Am I reading way too much into this book? An interim story recounted by Henry about a priest justifies my quandary.

An Irish priest who fell asleep in the sun one day on a park bench. He was dreaming, and when a young boy walked by and brushed his cheeks with a flower, the priest woke up, but still looked happy and forgetful around him. Suddenly he straightened up and the look of seriousness returned to his face.
The priest who for couple of minutes had forgotten his “mask” dreamed blissfully until his conscious self took charge and resumed his duly disposition.

At first, the book was pretty puzzling before I got the gist of the camouflaged dramatics, as his previous work [b:Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays|12113|Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)|Luigi Pirandello|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166491855s/12113.jpg|14456] relayed the same sentiments of illusionary realism of theatre but later contradicted on the notion of immutability of characters. Here, Pirandello tries to let the audience understand the fact that stage “reality” can be more authentic in real world. Whereas in 'Six Characters.... 'he talks about the illusion of emotive reality for its validity is corrupted by monotonous rehearsals. Nonetheless, both of them confront the essence of reality encumbered by metaphoric chimeras giving madness a therapeutic denotation. show less

If you want a sure thing in the quest to discover your self, you could spend the next ten years in analysis, see a psychologist, join a cult, read every book of philosophy and physics or you can read Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. I jest. But, this is about the illusory nature of theatre, more than the individual self. But still... We could wonder more about who we are by the end of it.

The forgotten modernist text that came out in that recent centenary of greats show more around 1922 (1921 in this case), the title sounds as good in translation as it does in the original. Clever of Pirandello to achieve that.

Plays often don’t work on the page, you miss all the staging. But in this case, the staging acts like text so you can read the extensive stage directions like you might read landscape details or even character descriptions. Again, pretty clever of Pirandello to make his work so usable.

What goes on here? Well, a theatre company is about to rehearse a play by Luigi Pirandello. They are gathering, the lead actress is late as one might expect, the stage is unfinished, stuff is kind of lying around, the lights aren’t set up right.

They are about to start and then, six characters come by. This is a big production. There’s half a dozen ‘actors’, producer, stage managers, prompters etc, so on stage at any one time there is usually around 15 people. Pirandello should know better, but you have to keep you budget down and think small cast. But, it’s not a play, it’s a “real” event we are watching, the play hasn’t started yet… the details haven’t been written, it’s all emerging.

These characters start telling everyone about their lives, only they are short on detail and big on passionate expression. So they come across as so ‘real’ that the producer abandons rehearsals and starts listening to the characters and thinks this would make a great play. At one level, the characters represent the stock in trade types, father, mother, son, daughter in law etc from which a family drama might be explored.

The producer and the characters go off and start to write and rehearse this new play. The producer becomes their author in a sense. They are raw, undetailed. They wear representative masks, they are not yet well drawn characters, or even selves. They think they are real and credible, based on their endless emotional outpourings. This makes me think I am reading at times a novel by Rachel Cusk and after reading this, I in fact read her recent book Second Place (funnily enough published 100 years after Six Characters, though unintentionally I suspect).

Pirandello loves to toy with illusions, the stage is not a stage, the actors are meagre performers, the only real is the unformed self, or the present embodiment of the self as it speaks in front of the audience, or perhaps the person speaking to you in the street is the only real we can experience, or what they say is the only thing we can know.

Best to read it, but there are no endings in the search. Oddly, as a Sicilian, Pirandello didn’t get much exposure in his native land for his theatre. show less

theatre troupe in search of their role in the play

Henry IV: That I’m no longer mad? Of course I’m not. Can’t you see? We’re having a bit of fun at the expense of those who believe I am.

Henry IV: Do you know what it’s like to find yourself face to face with a madman? To find yourself face to face with someone who shakes the very foundations of everything yo’ve built up in yourselves? Everything you’ve built up around you? Who challenges the logic, the logic of all that you’ve show more contructed?

Reading this play was a special reminder of how good some literature can be. Reading a play is a lesser experience than seeing it. You miss the movement, the acting, performance, the emphasis and the staging. 
The staging is so important here since the set is a recreation of an eleventh century estate. The substance of the play is staging the world of Henry IV for the man who thinks he is Henry IV, though we are in the twentieth century. Actors creating the illusion for him (the fourth wall of the theatre) is two thirds of the play.

We suspend disbelief by thinking that the whole thing is not even staged for us after all but this mad fellow on the stage who thinks he’s Henry IV. That illusion for us is created by the wonderful vignette early on of the actor who arrives on the stage in sixteenth century costume thinking he was performing for the historically consistent French Henry IV of that century. He complains that he swotted sixteenth century only to be told by the others that this Henry IV will tell the difference. Henry IV has the ability to tell anything out of place in this eleventh century German kingdom illusion.

Pirandello loves to explore this world of our illusions and fantasies. We all play roles in his world. Eventually that role might take over who we actually are and we lose the ability to tell the difference or when we do, consider the illusion better than reality. Then we face a choice. To stay in the role, or get back to 'reality' if we can remember what that was. That is what Henry IV is about. A riding accident twenty years earlier renders a minor aristocrat deluded and stuck acting out the role of the pageant he was performing in that day.

Everyone around Henry IV watches his performance but they must also become the performance themselves. This is a fascinating idea that reflects how we often (perhaps always) do this in daily life. So perhaps our own lives are lived as delusions, just to survive. We join in the pageant around us once we know what it is.

DI NOLLI: Madness has made a superb actor out of him. .. And a positively terrifying one.

How hard is it to step out of an illusion? It depends how good you are at it. Or how mad you become through the performance.

BELCREDI: As I see it… it was because of the immediate lucidity that comes from playing a part … from portraying some emotion … and at once put him out of touch with the very emotion he was feeling.

DONNA MATILDA: I shall never forget the scene … All our masked faces, hideous with terror, gazing at the terrible mask of his face. But it was a mask no longer .. It was the face of Madness itself.

Despite the fact that a book is a quiet personal reading experience not a theatre experience as intended, reading Henry IV offers the rich experience of its ideas.

I have a fantasy of winning the lottery and setting up a modern theatre repertoire company to perform modern works by Beckett, Pirandello, Pinter, Genet etc... one day maybe show less