Living Masks: The Achievement of Pirandello (review)

Umberto Mariani is a leading authority on Luigi Pirandello. In 2001, he published a study of Pirandello's theatre called La creazione del vero: il maggior teatro di Pirandello[The Creation of Truth: Pirandello's Major Characters], which was written both for scholars and for students reading the Sicilian playwright for the first time. The intention was to free the plays from the new critical approaches that they had attracted over the previous decade and to switch attention back to the dramatic and linguistic structures of the texts themselves. Living Masks: The Achievement of Pirandello is, in many ways, a continuation of this project, but on this occasion addressed to an English-speaking readership of students, actors, and directors. The monograph brings together previously published essays and papers that have been reworked for the occasion to produce a clear and cogent reading of Pirandello's theatre.

In common with the earlier volume, it is a book with a mission. It is Mariani's view that recent critical writing has had such a profoundly detrimental influence on stage productions in North America and Italy that it is now rare to find a production that works with the complete text or remains faithful to it. He gives the example of 1986, the fiftieth anniversary of Pirandello's death, when, according to Mariani, almost every theatre company in the United States took the opportunity to present one of his plays, but all of them, in one way or another, altered the text. Rather than see this process of acculturation or experimentation as a recognition of the playwright's stature, Mariani argues that it "barely conceals the implication that Pirandello's great works need linguistic, stylistic, and structural 'improvement'" (viii).

Living Masks opens with a presentation of the personaggio, the tormented Pirandellian character, usually of bourgeois background, who stands apart from society, living, in the words of the Stepfather in Six Characters in Search of an Author, a "life devoid of form," in which all structures, be they societal, intellectual, ethical, or psychological, have collapsed. Although the character knows that his loss is irreparable, he cannot relinquish the struggle to regain that lost sense of unity, identity, and purpose. In the six chapters that follow, each one dedicated to a major play, Mariani traces the fundamental division between those who question or reject the values and philosophy of their society and those who represent that society and bring unbearable pressure to conform on others. He begins his discussion of the individual works with Liolà (1916). Originally written in Sicilian, it has often been presented as an expression of Italian naturalism or verismo, with close links to the novels of Pirandello's fellow Sicilian Giovanni Verga. In a brief but interesting discussion, Mariani rescues the play from any suggestion of regionalism or Sicilianness (sicilianità) by presenting the protagonist as a marginalized raisonneur who, unlike the anonymous aristocrat masquerading as Henry IV in the play of that name or Angelo Baldovino in The Pleasure of Honesty or Leone Gala in The Rules of the Game, never falls victim to society.

Three further chapters focus on the tormented and persecutory relationship played out between character and society. But with the trilogy of metatheatrical plays of which Six Characters in Search of an Author is the first, another theme begins to emerge. Questions of authorship and ownership in relation to a dramatic work come to the fore in a lively discussion of the second of the trilogy, Each In His Own Way. The overview ends with The Mountain Giants, Pirandello's last, great, unfinished (and some would argue unfinishable) play. In a concluding chapter called "Pirandello in Our Time," Mariani sets out to correct any misapprehensions about Pirandello's debts to futurism – he has none – before going on to illustrate why the playwright is "unquestionably the primary source of twentieth-century theatre": more inventive and richer than Beckett or Brecht and, according to Mariani, an influence on existentialist writers and the theatre of the...