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

between the imagination and its emanations. Arising from those whom the workaday world has excluded, it can exist only in isolation from that world. Thus art becomes a hermetic activity and the excluded become the exclusive. Performance theatre, on the other hand, insists on art as communication. It cannot exist without the kind of creative imagination that, for Pirandello, is the source of all art and is embodied by Cotrone; but it seeks to harness that creativity and reconnect it with the world it has abandoned. For Ilse art is an essential dimension of humanity which should be offered to all men, whether they like it or not. In her single-minded devotion to this ideal she will suffer a death reminiscent of the archetypal performer Orpheus, battered and broken by an enraged mob.
    Pirandello does not ask us to choose between Cotrone and Ilse. Cotrone, the freewheeling anarchist and illusionist, is obviously the more attractive figure, especially if we think in terms of sheer spectacle. But his marvels and miracles have a superficial dazzling quality that is in tune with his regressive desire to escape adult responsibility: ‘I’ve told you already to learn from children who first invent a game and then believe in it and live it as true … If we were children once, we can always be children’ (
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, p. 179). It is not hard to see the limits of Cotrone’s playpen inventiveness. If Ilse’s high-minded alternative appears no less obviously flawed, this is largely because she herself is so unqualified to serve as a representative of the communicative function of the theatre. She shows no understanding of how art is shaped by the imagination and no readiness to compromise eitherwith her fellow actors or with her audience. Whereas Cotrone, as Strehler notes, ‘sums up all the possibilities of the theatre’, Ilse has no repertoire other than a single play that happens to be rooted in her own emotional experience and demands to be repeated and rejected over and over again. It is not the least of Pirandello’s paradoxes that Cotrone who cuts himself off from society has the broadest of human sympathies as we see from his treatment of the various misfits who compose his group, whereas Ilse who insists on taking art out amid the world of men is an unbending fanatic who listens to nobody and sacrifices not only herself but two of her troupe.
    The play as Pirandello left it breaks off as the thunderous arrival of the Mountain Giants strikes terror into the hearts of Cotrone’s followers and guests. Yet in Stefano Pirandello’s detailed account of his father’s intentions for the unwritten conclusion it is not the Giants themselves (who never appear on stage) but their brutal workforce, coarsened by heavy manual labour, who are responsible for the riot that leads to Ilse’s death. This may reflect Pirandello’s reluctance to mount anything that might seem like a direct attack on a Fascist regime that still accorded him a fair measure of official respect. It is also, however, an indication that his real concern is not with any particular form of government, whether authoritarian or democratic, but with the whole of modern industrial society which has left art without a social function. The Giants, after all, behave as well as one can expect from rulers who ‘are intent on vast projects to possess the powers and riches of the earth’ (
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, p. 183): they subsidize the theatre as an entertainment for their workforce and are ready to pay compensation when things turn out badly. Despite Ilse’s terrible fate, there is no suggestion that the creative activity of Cotrone’s villa will be in any way disturbed, and though the Count may proclaim that poetry has died with his wife, this is pure hyperbole. Poetry will surely continue to exist, as Auden puts it, ‘in the valley of its making where executives | Would never want to tamper’. The tragedy is not that art is in danger of extinction, but that marginalization and