The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Luigi Pirandello · a play without acts or scenes · six Characters, a company of Actors and their Manager, and one figure conjured · first performed at the Teatro Valle, Rome, 9 May 1921, and revised by its author in 1925 · scored on the definitive text of 1925 in Pirandello’s Italian, read from knowledge, with Eric Bentley’s translation (1952) and Mark Musa’s for sense; no text in hand, Italian quoted only where its words are certain, and no published translation quoted
Mode
Tragedy refused and comedy of the rehearsal in one action; a family melodrama told on purpose as melodrama, inside a play about the making of plays
Mythos
Creatures abandoned by their maker in search of another; the made more real and more lasting than the makers; the family as a fate repeated in every telling
Phase
One rehearsal, broken twice: the arrival, the drafting of the scenario offstage, the shop scene played and played again, the curtain dropped in error, the close in the garden
Presentation
Drama; one play without act divisions, played in three movements without a change of scene; six Characters, one figure conjured from the properties, a company of Actors, a Manager, a prompter and a stagehand
Register
From the Actors’ grumbling and the Manager’s practical objections to the Father’s argument, the Stepdaughter’s mockery, the Mother’s silence and her scream
Scale
One family across two households and a generation; one theatre, its company and its audience; a back room where dresses cover a brothel
Governing Proposition
A family of six, abandoned by the author who conceived them, walks into a theatre during a rehearsal and asks the company to stage the drama they carry: a father, a mother, her children by another man, a meeting in a back room where dresses cover a brothel, a child drowned and a shot. The wager of the play is that the drama is never made: the stage, its actors and its director cannot hold what the Characters are, and the failure to make the play, shown on a real stage before a real audience, is the play, and discloses that a person is fixed by others to one act while living as many.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“La commedia non ha atti né scene”
(the play has no acts or scenes). The direction at the head of the text announces that what follows will not be a play in the ordinary sense, and the subtitle of the definitive edition says what it will be instead: “commedia da fare”
(a play to be made). On the stage a company of Actors and their Manager, the Capocomico, are rehearsing a play by Pirandello himself, Il giuoco delle parti, which the Manager and the Actors find incomprehensible.
Into this rehearsal come six strangers: the Father, the Mother, the Stepdaughter, the Son, the Boy and the Little Girl. In the text Pirandello settled in 1925 they come in through the house, up from the auditorium where the audience sits. They are Characters. The author who conceived them abandoned them, and they have come to the theatre looking for someone who will. They do not ask to be played as actors play. They ask to have the drama they already are put on the stage.
Pirandello wrote the play for Dario Niccodemi’s company, which gave it first at the Teatro Valle in Rome on 9 May 1921; it was printed that year by Bemporad in Florence. He revised it, partly in the light of Georges Pitoëff’s Paris staging of April 1923, and the revised text of 1925, published by Bemporad with the author’s Preface, is the definitive text, the one played and translated since. It is the play scored here. The Preface is the author’s commentary on it, not a part of it.
Movement II
The drama the Characters carry is a family melodrama, and the play tells it as melodrama on purpose. The Mother has a second family, by another man, across a second household; the Son, the Father’s own, was abandoned. In poverty the Mother took in sewing. Madama Pace keeps a shop where the dresses cover a brothel, and there the Father met the Stepdaughter, the girl he had once watched leaving school: a daughter sold, and a meeting at the edge of incest.
That meeting is the one scene the Characters live for, and each of them holds it differently. For the Father it is one moment out of a life, by which he is judged and to which he is fastened for good; a man, he argues, is many, and the others see only the one form in which they caught him. For the Stepdaughter it is what he is, and she will not let him be anything else. The Mother suffers without speaking. The Son repudiates the whole of it and refuses to act his part, and his refusal is as fixed as any of their suffering.
The Manager comes to think there may be a play in this. He and the Father go off to draft the scenario, and the Actors clear the stage. The performance is interrupted for the first time by its own preparation. When the company returns, the Characters are to show the scene and the Actors are to learn it, and the prompter is set to take it down in shorthand.
Movement III
The shop has to be made from what the theatre has. Stock scenery stands in for Madama Pace’s back room, and the Father hangs hats and coats on the pegs. Then Madama Pace is there, materialised among the hats and coats, and the Actors are terrified. The Father’s explanation is that the stage itself has summoned her, that the place made ready for a character draws the character to it.
It is the play’s most uncanny moment, and it is done entirely with the means of the stage: a row of pegs, some hats, a figure who should not be there. The comedy of the rehearsal, with its grumbling and its practical objections, has been the ground of the play until now; here the ground gives, and what stands on the stage is neither an actor nor a property.
A narrated version of this would be a conceit, the narrator telling us that a character came. On a stage, before real actors who must impersonate the six, the difference between a character and the one who plays her becomes something seen and heard. The Characters are fixed; the Actors are living and changeable; and the play’s knowledge lives in the gap between them, which only the theatre can show.
Movement IV
The Characters play the scene in the shop first. As the Father’s hand touches her the Mother screams, and the rehearsal of the scene breaks into the event itself. What was being shown is happening, and no one on the stage can hold the two apart.
Then the Actors play it, to learn it, and the Characters watch themselves done and deride what they see. The Stepdaughter laughs at the Leading Lady’s version of her. The Manager, for his part, wants propriety and order, and cuts the very things the Characters need the scene to contain. The stage, in its own working, betrays what it represents.
The Father argues the case at length: that a character is more real than an actor, that a character outlives the man who wrote him, that one born alive cannot die. The Stepdaughter mocks his theorising, and her mockery shows that the play knows how long he talks. Then a stagehand drops the curtain by mistake, and the performance is interrupted a second time, not by preparation but by an accident of the theatre’s machinery.
Movement V
The last sequence is set in the garden. The Little Girl is drowned in the fountain. A shot sounds behind the trees, and the Actors cannot say whether the Boy is dead: it is called reality and it is called fiction, and the two words are shouted against each other with neither prevailing.
The lights fail; the Manager cries for light; and four of the six remain, seen only as silhouettes. The spectator, like the Actors, cannot decide whether the shot was a performance, and the play has been built so that the question cannot be decided. Every event on that stage has been at once a rehearsal and an occurrence, from the company’s grumbling about the new Pirandello to the child in the fountain.
Pirandello went on to two more plays of the theatre within the theatre, Ciascuno a suo modo (1924) and Questa sera si recita a soggetto (1930), and received the Nobel Prize in 1934. This one was staged in New York in 1922, in Paris by Pitoëff in 1923 and in Berlin by Max Reinhardt in 1924, and the word made from its author’s name entered several languages. The drama the six came to have made was never made. The play that shows its not being made has been played for more than a century.
Act III · The Twelve
The bones of the play bear the subtractive test. Remove the rehearsal of Il giuoco delle parti and the Characters arrive in no theatre. Remove Madama Pace and the one scene they live for has nowhere to happen. Remove the Son, who refuses to act his part, and the play loses its proof that a character can be fixed in refusal as well as in suffering. Each of the six is required by the family scenario and by the argument at once. What holds the axis below the high eights is the Father: his speeches on the many selves, on the single moment by which a man is judged, and on the character’s advantage over the actor are each necessary, but stated, restated and argued back at a length the play does not need.
Score: 8.6 / 10
What the play brings into the open can be stated and holds. A person is judged and held, by others and by himself, to a single act: the Father, met at Madama Pace’s with the girl he once watched leaving school, is fastened to that moment, and the Stepdaughter will not let him be anything else. What we call a personality is many and changing, while the form others see is one and fixed, and the gap is a suffering, not a puzzle. And of its own art: the stage betrays what it represents, and the Manager’s demands for order cut the very scene the Characters need. Held below the top because much of this is stated in the Father’s theory rather than let stand, and drawn more as an idea than as a life.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The play reaches height several times, and the heights are real. Madama Pace appears when the Father hangs hats and coats on the pegs to make her shop: the play’s most uncanny moment, and one of the great coups of the modern stage. The Mother’s scream as the Father’s hand touches the Stepdaughter breaks the rehearsal of the scene into the event itself. The last sequence, the Little Girl drowned in the garden fountain, the shot behind the trees, the Actors unable to say whether the Boy is dead, the lights failing, is the third. Between them much of the play is argument and the comedy of rehearsal, whose register is wit and exasperation. It rises by shock more than by sustained ascent, and the heights are intermittent.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The archetype is built, not evoked: creatures abandoned by their maker go looking for one, and the play’s whole structure is that search. It inverts the oldest relation in story, between maker and made, and makes the made more real and more lasting than the makers: the Father appeals to the fact that a character outlives the man who wrote him, and that one born alive cannot die. Beneath runs a second pattern, the family as a fate repeated in every telling, with its near-incest, its sold daughter, its mute grieving mother and its son who repudiates all of it. Held at the gate rather than above it because the family story is stock by design, and its reach depends on the frame more than on people who are thin as people by intent.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the well-made bourgeois drama of adultery and family shame, the Italian teatro grottesco of the 1910s, the old device of the play within the play, from Shakespeare and Calderón to Tieck, and Pirandello’s own stories of characters calling on their author. The turn is a reversal of the stage’s ontology. The drama is not played but refused; the play we watch is the failure to make one; the fourth wall is not broken as a device but abolished as a premise, and in the definitive text the Characters walk in through the audience. Held below the very top only because the play within the play had a long ancestry, and the story of characters seeking their author was already Pirandello’s own.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Substitute another form and the play stops knowing almost everything it knows. In a novel the Characters would be a narrator’s conceit, in a story an idea. Only on a stage, before real actors who must impersonate them, does the gap between the fixed form of a character and the living, changeable actor become visible and audible, and that gap is the subject. The rehearsal frame, the Manager’s cuts, the Leading Lady’s reading of the Stepdaughter, the prompter taking the scene down in shorthand, the stagehand’s mistaken curtain: each is a property of theatre made an instrument of thought. The ending works only because the spectator, like the Actors, cannot decide whether the shot was a performance. Held a step from the top by the Father’s lectures, where form briefly becomes container.
Score: 9.4 / 10
A century of return has not exhausted it, and the evidence is in what it has carried: a philosophy of identity, a theory of fiction and of authorship, a theatre of the absurd before the name, a family drama read psychoanalytically, a document of Italian modernism and of the crisis of the bourgeois self after the war. Each new staging finds the frame applies to its own theatre, since the Manager is always the director of the day. The Stepdaughter keeps yielding: victim, accuser, performer and the Character who most wants the scene played, her relation to the Father is not settled by the text. Held below the nineties because the theses, once grasped, are explicit, and a reader returning finds the argument where it was; the depth renews in performance more than in rereading.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is the European drama of the twentieth century, entered from the Italian theatre. Intrinsic force: the play reorganised what a stage may admit about itself, making the conditions of performance, actor, director, audience, rehearsal and curtain, the matter of the drama. Held below the very top because Chekhov and Brecht moved the century’s stage as far by other roads, and because part of the reach is a manner, the play within the play taken as a device, rather than the play’s depth. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Georges Pitoëff staged it in Paris in 1923, Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1924, and it was played in New York in 1922; its author followed it with two further plays of the theatre within the theatre, won the Nobel Prize in 1934, and his name became an adjective in several languages.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over a hundred and five years, in the step for seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole, in the author’s own definitive revision; nothing is lost, and its two states are an author’s revision, not a corruption. Presence is continuous and wide: in the Italian repertory without break, translated into the major languages from the 1920s, staged across the world in every decade since, and studied wherever modern drama is taught. Its surface is in part fixed to its moment, the touring company with its prompter and its Capocomico, but the play has outlived that theatre and is played for what it pressed upon. Held at the usual figure rather than the widest because its presence outside the theatre and the classroom is narrower than that of the most widely read books of its century.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on the Italian as far as translation carries it; the music of Pirandello’s prose dialogue is neither credited nor charged. The dramaturgy is masterly in its mechanics: the arrival of the Characters into a dull rehearsal, the Actors’ comedy and the Manager’s practical objections, the double interruption, the setting of Madama Pace’s shop from stock scenery, the scene played twice, first by the Characters and then by the Actors to the Characters’ derision, and the dissolving close, each placed with a sure sense of the stage’s time. The comic and the harrowing are kept in one instrument. Held below the nineties by the Father’s discursive manner, sentences that argue rather than act, and by the Mother’s near-silence, right for her but leaving a principal role played chiefly in gesture and a scream.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the backstage comedy of a company complaining about the new play by Pirandello it has to rehearse, and the Little Girl dead in the fountain. They obey one law: every event on that stage is at once a rehearsal and an occurrence, and the play never lets the two be separated. The Actors’ farce of the shop scene and the Mother’s scream belong to the same physics. The ending holds the law to the last: fiction and reality are shouted against each other, and neither prevails. The range is wide, from comic routine to metaphysics to family tragedy, and it is governed. Held a tenth below the high mark only because the Father’s theoretical speeches stand a little outside the law, addressed past the stage to the house as the author’s argument.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged as a single play of under two hours, and not charged for that. It holds consciousness and the self, in the Father’s and the Stepdaughter’s divided accounts; the family across two households and a generation, with the Mother’s second family and the abandoned son; sexuality and its commerce, in Madama Pace’s shop, where dresses cover a brothel; poverty, and a mother taking in sewing; art and its institution, in the company, the director and the audience; and a metaphysics of being and form. These are integrated through one family and one stage. What holds it lowest of the twelve: the state, history, labour beyond the needle and the theatre, the sacred and the natural order are absent or only glimpsed.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.4, then The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 9.2 and The Imperishable at 9.1. A form that is the knowledge, since only a stage before real actors can show the gap between a fixed character and a living player; a reversal of the stage’s ontology in which the drama is refused and the fourth wall abolished as a premise; a reorganisation of what the twentieth-century stage may admit about itself; and a text whole in its author’s own revision, played without break for a century.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: the self, the family, sexuality and its commerce, poverty, art and its institution, and a metaphysics of being and form are held through one family and one stage, and the state, history, the sacred and the natural order are absent or glimpsed. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.4, where the heights come by shock and are intermittent, with long stretches of argument and the comedy of rehearsal between them; then The Inevitable and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6, where the Father’s theory runs longer than the play needs. The music of the Italian prose is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Inner Law at 8.9, The Made at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Swerve at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Luigi Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, subtitled in its definitive edition “commedia da fare” (a play to be made): first performed by Dario Niccodemi’s company at the Teatro Valle, Rome, on 9 May 1921, and first printed in 1921 by Bemporad, Florence; revised by the author, partly in the light of Georges Pitoëff’s Paris staging of April 1923, and published in its definitive text by Bemporad in 1925, with the author’s Preface. It is scored as a text for performance: the 1925 text, the one played and translated since. The 1921 text is context and is not scored; the differences between the two are not detailed here. The Preface is the author’s commentary and is not scored as part of the play; it bears only as evidence of the design. Productions are evidence of the play’s life, and none of them is the work. Every axis, The Made included, is judged on Pirandello’s Italian. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. The play is known well, in English and in parts in Italian, with its staging history in outline. Italian is quoted only where its words are certain, the opening direction and the subtitle, each with a plain English rendering made for this page; everything else is paraphrased. The play has no act divisions, so nothing is cited by place. Translation · Eric Bentley’s version, in Naked Masks (1952), is the one best known to this reading and was used for sense, with Mark Musa’s for Penguin beside it. Neither is in hand, neither is quoted, and nothing in either is charged or credited to the play. The music of Pirandello’s prose dialogue is not heard here in detail, and is neither credited nor charged. Facts that could not be verified, among them the running time, the Father’s share of the words, the reception of the first performance, the title and date of the earlier story behind the play, the exact course of the play’s influence on the French stage, and particular later adaptations, are not given.