The Theatre: Playwright of 1934

Between 1901 and 1933 the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded 31 times.Italy was honoured twice,* playwrights seven times.* Each of these categories was upped one day last week when the Swedish Academy singled out Italian Playwright Luigi Pirandello to receive $41,318 of the late, dynamite-making Alfred Bernhard Nobel’s money and the distinction of being Literary Man of 1934.

To qualify for the Nobel prize a writer needs an international reputation, a large body of work and a grey frost of years. It also helps if his country has not received an award for some time, because the Academicians at Stockholm like to strike a delicate balance between diplomacy and recognition of literary merit. Once it decided that Italy was due for an award, the Nobel Prize Committee was of necessity limited in its choice to four men: Poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, Estheticist Benedetto Croce, Historian Guglielmo Ferrero, Playwright Pirandello. Drama lovers the world over were highly pleased at the final selection.

His Nobel Prize came at a happy moment for Luigi Pirandello. Last spring he did the libretto for an opera called The Legend of the Changeling Son which was loudly booed at its Roman premiere. Benito Mussolini had it recalled for “moral incongruity” while the well-trained Italian Press chorused “un-Fascist.”

None of Playwright Pirandello’s work is calculated to arouse mass appreciation. When his Six Characters in Search of an Author was presented in Manhattan in 1922, the management served notice that the drama was “not for morons.” But average playgoers did not find Six Characters altogether incomprehensible. A father, mother, stepdaughter and son appear on a bare stage where some actors are about to rehearse a play, insist on working out their destinies as they were conceived in the mind of a playwright who did not get around to setting them down on paper.

A further illustration of the Pirandello thesis that “nothing is true, but anything might be” was given U. S. theatregoers in 1925 with the production of Right You Are If You Think You Are. Here a husband and a mother-in-law are convinced that his wife and her daughter are two different people. In the mouth of an observer who tolerantly holds that both are right, Pirandello has stated his whole dramatic philosophy: “What can we know really about other people—who they are—what they are—what they are doing, and why they are doing it? … All I’m saying is that you should show some respect for what other people see with their eyes and feel with their fingers, even though it be the exact opposite of what you see and feel.”

In one of his latest works Playwright Pirandello has taken the Six Characters theme one spectacular step farther. Tonight We Improvise uses members of the audience for cast, has some of its most dramatic action take place during the intermission in the theatre lobby.

Well qualified for popular metaphysics is this bald, goat-bearded, little playwright who lives in a small apartment on the outskirts of Rome. The University of Bonn gave him his doctorate of philosophy in 1893. He then took up poetry, novel-writing, schoolteaching, did not turn to the drama until he was 45. The brilliant wit and perverse unreality of a dozen of his plays have been relished by foreign readers in 15 languages. A charter member of the Italian Academy, he made his peace early with Fascism. His plays have made him fame but no fortune and the Nobel Prize money will come in handy. “Of course I’m going to keep it,” said Playwright Pirandello last week. “There are poor authors, too.”

* Giosue Carducci, 1906; Grazia Deladda, 1926. †Sweden’s Bjornsterne Bjornson (1903); Spain’s Jose Etcheparay (1904); France’s Maurice ‘Maeterlinck (1911); Germany’s Gerhart Hauptmann (1912); Spain’s Jacinto Benavento (1922); Ireland’s William Butler Yeats (1923); Ireland’s George Bernard Shaw (1925).