Ugo Betti: The Theater of "Shame"

UGO BETTI: THE THEATER OF HSHAME" 1 UGO BETTI CONCLUDES AN ESSAY ENTITLED "Religion and the Theatre" with a passage that points to what lies at the center of his body· of work for the stage, work that to a superficial view, has created a texture of event that is an astounding compendium of violence. Yet, as the entire essay makes clear, Betti's restrospective glance at his workhis effort to relate its significance to his era-sees in his body of plays a religious assertion: the only sort of religious assertion that is likely to be viable in the twentieth century. His work, he judges, is in contrast to plays which take a religious event (the martyrdom of Bernanos' Carmelites, for example) and works towards conclusions that are both foregone and edifying. Betti also sees his plays about ordinary human beings caught up in extraordinarily melodramatic action as in sharp contrast with dramas which exploit somewhat recondite religious difficulties, such as self-acceptance on the part of sophisticated protagonists (and here Betti would seem to have in mind the theater of T. S. Eliot). Instead, Betti defines his own concern as one which drove him to consider the destinies of ordinary, passionate, wilful, and selfcentered men and women; these persons, thanks to their own natures and to the intellectual climate which nourished those natures, were hardly aware that they were finally responsible for the actS' which they performed-were hardly aware that a divine attention had followed whatever they had done. In a world secular, indifferent, and relativistic , the majority of men and women act as though there were no divine attention focused on their error. Men live, most of the time, unaware of a "bewildering incongruity between our existence and what it ought to be according to the aspirations of our soul." Betti concedes that these needs are finally inexplicable. (He judges that they are presented as explicable in the sort of religious drama that brings in effects of stained glass and triumphant organ music.) But he argues-and so ends his essay on the religious theater-that it is just these inexplicable, scarcely sensed needs that should win dramatic expression. He writes: But in the soul of the unjust man, and even in the soul of the judge who betrays justice, we will discover that, in the end, he, himself, cannot breathe or survive without justice. Underneath 64 1969 THE THEATER OF "SHAME" 65 the most hardened bitterness we will, at a certain point, discover in the cruel, selfish, lost souls, a need for mercy, harmony, solidarity , immortality, trust, forgiveness, and above all, for love: a mercy and a love which are far greater than the pale imitations offered by this world. This is a thirst which all the foundations of the earth cannot quench. Each of these mysterious needs is one side of a perimeter whose complete figure, when we finally perceive it, has one name: GOD. Several comments are in order before one turns from this theoretical justification of a body of work to the work itself. Though Betti's dramas are far from pietistic (they are not facile demonstrations of the central faith of the dramatist), the piety which he wishes to demonstrate is a rather simple one. It is not touched by the ambiguities that historical criticism, form analysis, and existential discourse have imported into much present religious awareness. As the passage just quoted suggests-indeed, as crucial turns in the plays themselves insinuate -the religiousness of Betti is, in its essentials, a traditional one. It is one that can spell the name of deity in capital letters; it is one for which the central fact of religious experience is a divine awareness which both judges and loves, one which is best known in the person of Christ. The difficulties of the plays result not from any great complexity in the divine vistas which man may choose to enter; they result from the countless subterfuges-the "many inventions"-which express man's unwillingness to respond to the obvious: that divine love and judgment are the focus of man's universe rather than man's own will for himself. Non-pietistically, the plays represent...