Hugh Vickers on a ‘wicked little comedy’ by the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello

I’m much looking forward to seeing ShockTroupe’s production of one of Pirandello’s first major plays, Cap and Bells, which opens at the Old Fire Station in Oxford tonight.

And not only because it’s directed by a gifted friend of mine, Lary Graham, co-creator of the splendidly horrific Dracula Spectacular, at the College of Further Education. More recently, he has directed Donagh MacDonagh’s Step in the Hollow, among other successes with the Oxford Irish Drama Society.

In Cap and Bells, Lary turns his hand to one of the great undervalued dramatists of the last century. Luigi Pirandello was born significantly earlier, in 1867 at Agrigento in Sicily, early enough, therefore, for his parents to have met when both were involved in Garibaldi’s triumphant campaign to liberate the island in 1860. But for Luigi’s generation, those glories have given place to the intense political and moral disillusionment so powerfully expressed in Lampedusa’s novel (finely filmed by Visconti) The Leopard.

Pirandello’s father was an aggressive, self-made businessman in the risky — and brutal — sulphur mining industry. He proved willing, however, to finance his scholarly son’s studies not just at Palermo University, but also in Rome and, most unusually, for a doctorate in advanced linguistics in Bonn.

It was in 1894 that Pirandello took the first step into the darkness which was to envelop so much of his life. He was living in Rome, the centre of a brilliant literary circle and a prolific writer of articles and short stories when he inexplicably accepted a suggestion from his father Stefano that he marry Antonietta, the daughter of his father’s partner, virtually a complete stranger. It is said Stefano had received the entire (considerable) dowry in cash, in advance. In short order, Pirandello found himself saddled with three children and a beautiful, dim wife with whom he could barely communicate; in 1903, the situation turned tragic — an appalling accident wiped out the sulphur mine, with catastrophic financial consequences. Antonietta reacted to the shock with physical paralysis, followed by an ever-worsening mental breakdown. In 1918, he was finally obliged to commit her to an institution; she died there only in the 1950s.

 

Pirandello’s reaction to his wife’s illness in 1903 was to sit by her bedside writing his extraordinary novel The Late Matthia Pascal in which he exorcises the strongly tempting notion of suicide by imagining a hero who simply disapp-ears from a desperate family situation and, fortified by a lucky win in Monte Carlo, leads a complete parallel life under a false name. Here already are the themes he was to explore in the plays — the questioning of identity and authenticity, the sense of society as a force violently hostile to the individual, the possibility that its members indeed play by rules which a ‘sane’ person would consider ‘mad’.

Against this grim background, Pirandello took up writing for the stage in 1916, at the suggestion of a Sicilian actor friend; Cap and Bells (1917) is among his first crop of plays with a setting in his native Sicily. Writing some five plays a year, he quickly shed the earthy Sicilian background; Rules of the Game (1918) is already set in the brittle world of the Roman upper class. Increasingly successful, he achieved a stunning breakthrough with Six Characters In Search of an Author (1921) — a fiasco in Rome, but produced to immense effect in Paris, London and new York, establishing him as a major European dramatist.

Cap and Bells, then, is an early play, but by an extremely experienced writer already in his 40s. He looks back on the Sicilian world of his childhood, and though this play is set in a bourgeois little country town, this is still at the heart the primitive Sicily which opera-lovers know from Cavalleria Rusticana, where only death can atone for dishonour. Pirandello’s starting point is ‘Verismo’ (‘slice-of-life’ realism), but he allows his hero, Ciampa (the first of a line of ironic outsider figures) to triumph over the closed society by turning its rules upside down.

Ciampa at first appears a pathetic victim, a complaisant husband who has for years connived at his wife’s adultery with the boss, Fiorica. The crisis comes when Fiorica’s wife, Beatrice (a fine study in hysteria) denounces the pair to the authorities (in the shape of Spano, an almost Ealing Comedy local policeman). Beatrice imagines the family will take her side; instead Ciampa so manipulates it that she (not the husband) is perceived as beyond the pale for attempting to destroy the status quo. As he says, ‘in society we are only puppets’; now society rallies round to sustain the puppet show.

So Beatrice must be excluded and what better solution for everyone than having her declared mad and carted off? ‘It’s no hardship to appear insane dear lady — just keep telling everyone the truth’.

Here are the seeds not just of modern-ist theatre but also of so many baffled modern characters doomed in their search for ‘authenticity’ — certainly ever since Meursault, in Camus’s L’Étranger; finds himself condemned to death not because he shot the Arab, but because he could not weep at his mother’s funeral.

Cap and Bells
Old Fire Station, Oxford
Thursday to Saturday at 7.30pm
Visit oxfordplayhouse.co.uk, pop into Oxford Playhouse or call 01865 305305 for tickets