Pirandellian Theatre Games: Spectator as Victim

Pirandellian Theatre Games: Spectator as Victim' J.L. STY AN Pirandello has a good deal in common with Moliere: his results are so thoughtprovoking that he is discussed first as a philosopher when he is very much of a farceur . I have chosen the word carefully, and use it in the sense of "practical joker.,,' And his methods seem to encourage directors to take liberties of their own. Those interested in the story of his success on the stage point to the sensational production of Six Characters in Search of an Author when it was directed by Georges Pitoeff at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in 1923. By that time the Paris audience was moderately accustomed to the shocks and surprises of a symbolist and surrealist drama. 1917 had seen Apollinaire's The Breasts of Tiresias, in which the rebellious feminist wore red and blue balloons for bosoms, and let them fly on strings before exploding them. 1921 saw Cocteau's The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, also at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, a play flaunting two music-hall comperes dressed as gramophones and a set like a camera: on the command, "Watch the birdie!", an oSlrich stepped out. But in 1923, the actors in Six Characters did worse yet: lhey entered in their everyday clothes and walked through the auditorium. They had invaded the province of the audience, breaking the comfortable rule of nineteenth-century theatre that actors should know their place. And when they climbed on the stage, there was nothing on it. Neither Apollinaire nor Cocteau had thought of being as surrealistic as that. Then came the sensation. When it was the moment for the six Characters to enter, they were flooded with a green light and lowered to the stage in an old cage-lift, a stage elevator previously used for scenery. Pitoeff had had a bright idea, Paris went wild, and Pirandello was honored by the French government. This remarkable event could be viewed in different ways. Was it simply a stunt, another touch of Dada, and therefore too irrational to warrant explanation ? Were characters to be regarded as pieces of scenery? Was there some profound philosophical implication that the imagination had forsaken standards ofobjective reality? It was certainly not symbolism, which Pirandello hated: he LL. STYAN believed that the mechanical shape imposed on a symbolist play could destroy its spontaneity, and in t925 he wrote to the Virginia Quarterly Review insisting that Six Characters was conceived in amoment of untrammelled ilIumination.3 Nor was the director trying to suggest that the Characters were descending from supernatural spheres - in any case, the creaking machinery would have ruined any etherial quality. There was absolutely no illusion about their entrance at all, and in her recent book Anne Paolucci has argued persuasively that the trick made a complete breach in theatre tradition' Well, it was a time for complete breaches, and attempts had been made before to burst out of the dramatic frame and abolish the conventions of the proscenium arch. Max Reinhardt had alarmed the London audiences watching his Oedipus Rex in 1912 by having his huge crowd of supers, made up of battalions of drama students and boy scouts, surge through the auditorium, up the aisles and over a gangway built over the seats. If Greek decorum was somewhat forgotten, the audience was quite overwhelmed, and Punch had a delicious drawing of the terrible predicament which awaited the unfortunate spectator who arrived late and was swept down the aisle by a forest of Theban spears. Nevertheless, the required response to seeing some actors lowered in an old stage elevator was, "Look, they're lowering some actors in an old stage elevator." The effect was a disarming way of saying at the outset that here was a play which was not going to deal in illusion, but simply investigate it, without trying to deceive the audience. This of course is more easily said than done, as Brecht was to discover. For an audience likesnothing so much as to be deceived and to believe what it sees. I once produced Waiting for Godot, and when it came time for the moon to rise over Beckeu's...