Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, The Mountain Giants (Oxford World's Classics) Read Online Free PDF

Giants
, the unfinished play that Pirandello was working on at the time of his death in 1936, was conceived as the last of a trilogy of myths. Myth, as Pirandello uses the term, may be taken to mean any ideal (or ‘fiction’) which we use to give meaning to our common experience and which, precisely because it cannot ultimately be realized in concrete terms, offers a permanent motive for change.The first play in the trilogy,
The New Colony
(1928), examines the social myth through the attempt of a group of outcasts and idealists to create a self-sufficient Utopian community; the second,
Lazarus
(1929), takes up the religious myth in the emergence of a new nature-based and dogma-free spirituality;
The Mountain Giants
deals with the myth of art.
    Pirandello had been working on the play since 1929 and this unusually long gestation can be explained by a developing crisis in his relations with Italy’s Fascist regime. Disillusioned, as so many Italians were, by the failure of parliamentary democracy to fulfil the Garibaldian ideals of national unity and social justice, he had joined the party in 1924, and in public at least that adherence never wavered. There were, however, cracks beneath the surface. Mussolini failed to give full support to the dramatist’s plans for a national theatre and the Fascist aesthetic found D’Annunzio’s patriotic grandiloquence more to its taste than Pirandello’s existential questioning. Official congratulations on the award of the Nobel Prize in 1934 were more polite than enthusiastic. The clearest sign, however, that Pirandello was now out of step with the regime came with
The Fable of the Changeling Son
(1934), the verse play that he gave as a libretto to the composer Gian Francesco Malipiero. Based on Sicilian folklore, the story is that of the beautiful Son stolen away to be brought up as a prince while a deformed changeling takes his place. At the end the Son is reunited with the Mother, returns to live a humble life with her in the sunlit South, and renounces his gloomy northern kingdom in favour of the changeling. First performed in Germany, the opera was immediately banned for fear that the deformed changeling might be associated with Hitler. In Italy also performances were cancelled after Mussolini had already excised a passage that seemed to denigrate the idea of the providential Leader: ‘Believe me, change this crown of glass and paper to one of gold and precious stones, this little cape into a regal mantle, and the comic king becomes a king in earnest that you bow down before. There’s nothing else needed, just as long as you believe it’ (
MN
iv. 803). This is the same play that Countess Ilse and her company bring to the remote villa of the Scalognati at the start of
The Mountain Giants
.
    Pirandello’s experience with
The Fable of the Changeling Son
did not provoke a rejection of Fascist ideology, but it did intensify his growing concern with the role of art in society as exemplified by the theatre. In a letter to Marta Abba Pirandello described the subject of
The Mountain Giants
as ‘the triumph of fantasy, the triumph ofpoetry, but also the tragedy of poetry in this brutal modern world’. 7 Ilse and her itinerant troupe come to the magical villa of Cotrone in the hope that he will help them arrange a public performance of
The Changeling Son
, the play written by the poet who loved her and to which she has dedicated her life. Cotrone, however, urges her to remain at the villa where the play will mysteriously create itself, freed from the constraints of the theatre and the incomprehension of a philistine society. Giorgio Strehler, whose 1967 Milan production gave
The Mountain Giants
a new lease of life, saw Cotrone and Ilse as illustrating the difference between what he called pure theatre and performance theatre. 8 Pure theatre exists only within the magic confines of the villa, a ludic and solipsistic zone of untrammelled creativity where there is no mediating factor