SHAW AND PIRA N DELLO
597
Realism and Romanticism, including and transcending those genres,
as well as Shaw's solitary farce-of-rationalizing.
Six Characters
is a convenient example of Pirandello's art : his
most famous work, and his first unqualified success.
When the play begins, the curtain is up, the set is stacked against
the stage-wall, and a troupe of actors with their director is rehearsing
a new play by Pirandello. The rehearsal is interrupted by the arrival
of a family in deep mourning: Father, Mother, grown Daughter
and Son, and two younger children. These are the "characters"–
fictions of the imagination of an author who has refused to write
their story-and they have come to get their story or their drama
somehow realized. They ask the actors to perform it instead of the
play by Pirandello which they had started to rehearse. From this
point, the play develops on several levels of make-believe. There is
the struggle of the "characters" against the actors and their director,
who find the story confusing, or boring, or not good box-office. There
is the more savage struggle between the various characters, who can–
not agree about the shape, the meaning, or even the facts of their
story, for each has rationalized, or mythicized it,
in
his own way. A
few sordid facts emerge: the Father had sent the Mother away to
live with another man, whom, he thought, she would love better, and
the two younger children are hers by this other man. Hovering near
the family, watching its life at a little distance, the Father had met
his own Daughter at a house of assignation, Madame Pace's dress
shop. Complicated jealousies had developed among the four children
of the double brood, culminating in the suicide of the little boy.
The crucial episodes are re-enacted by the tormented and disputing
characters,
in
order to show the actors what the story is. When the
suicide of the little boy comes up again, by a sort of hellish eternal
recurrence, all breaks up in confusion-the fictive characters more
real, in their conscious suffering, than the flesh-and-blood acting
company.
The story of the six characters, as we gradually make it out,
is melodramatic and sensational. The disputes which break out from
time to time about "idea and reality," "life and art," and the like,
are based on paradoxes in the Shavian manner: romantically-unre–
solved ambiguities. The whole work may seem, at first sight, to be
shop-worn
in
its ideas, and, in its dramaturgy, hardly more than a
