Liolà (NHB Classic Plays) E-Book

Luigi Pirandello

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 98

Beschreibung

A funny and touching new version of Pirandello's high-spirited drama, set at the heart of a rural community where property and family unleash fierce passions. Sicily, summer 1916. The women gather to harvest old Simone's almond crop. He's the richest landowner in the district but he has no heir. Local lad Liolà, untroubled by convention, has fathered three boys, each with a different mother. When another of the girls falls pregnant, Simone is persuaded he might recognize the baby as his own, much to his young wife, Mita's, despair. But he underestimates the power of Liolà, who has his own unusual sense of what's right and wrong - and a way with women to make your hair curl. Tanya Ronder's version of Luigi Pirandello's 1916 play Liolà was first performed at the National Theatre, London, in 2013. 'Earthy, exuberant and fecund with symbolism and superstition... it leaves behind a delicious, golden glow' - The Times 'Winning... touching and entertaining, it glows with the warmth of summer' - Telegraph 'Wonderfully warm... thoroughly entertaining' - Exeunt Magazine

Leseprobe

Luigi Pirandello

LIOLÀ

in a new version by

Tanya Ronder

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Introduction

Original Production

Characters

Liolà

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Son of Chaos

‘A poet of human suffering’ is the phrase theatre professor, Ortolani, uses to describe Luigi Pirandello. He urges us to listen for ‘the agony echoing from within’ the dramas of Italy’s enigmatic dramatist. Not a hard ask with most Pirandello plays – they scream misery from the page, tell stories of people trapped in their lives or some nether-life where nobody can exit their vexed reality. Not so, however, with Liolà. This is Pirandello on vacation. He wrote it in 1916 after a trip home to Sicily. Pirandello describes this play as a comedy ‘full of songs and sunshine… so light-hearted it doesn’t seem like one of my works’ – and it is uncharacteristically joyful. Yet, light-hearted? He can’t shake himself off that easily. The idiosyncratic pain glints brightly beneath the loveliness. Quite apart from the dearth of young men in the world of the play – they emigrated in droves from Sicily in that era to escape poverty and seek work further afield – and the vivid portrait of the limited lot of women, there is the question of what fired Pirandello to write it. Where did the impulse to create the great Sicilian libertine Liolà come from?

Local labourer Liolà is a single father of three boys, each child the offspring of a different woman. Liolà takes full charge of the consequences of his affairs and brings the children up, with his mother’s help, uncomplainingly. He works hard, jokes, sings and clearly enjoys sex. A creation of ultimate fecundity, Liolà is at ease with himself and the world around him. Bringing life with him wherever he goes, he is nature’s force and has a way with women to make your hair curl. Pirandello, on the other hand, didn’t manage women so effortlessly. His marriage slid into extended despair as his wife’s nervous disposition escalated into madness, and that was not his only foiled relationship. The lightness in Liolà articulates an absolute counterpoint to the dogged yearning Pirandello experienced throughout his life. He longed for a fullness of relations with a number of key women, with all of whom it proved impossible. ‘I write to forget myself,’ he puts in a letter to Marta Abba, the final subject of his unrequited love. Written at the height of Pirandello’s difficulties with his wife, Liolà seems to spring out as a form of ideal, the kind of man that Pirandello knew he could never be.

Unsurprisingly, the formative pattern of his parents’ relationship was not the healthiest model. His father, Stefano, cheated on Luigi’s mother with his niece, no less, with whom he had weekly liaisons in the convent where his sister was prioress. In a short story, Pirandello describes the scene where he, as a youngster, goes and catches them one Sunday. His father hides behind the green curtain, too short to conceal his feet, while the fourteen-year-old Pirandello spits in his unfaithful cousin’s face.

Pirandello’s first love, at the age of fourteen, was Linuccia, another cousin of his. Four years older than him she was a bright, lovely girl who adored him and may well have been his best chance. By the time he was eighteen, they were engaged, but he was self-conscious doing the mating charade in front of family and community and felt inadequate alongside her several more senior admirers. So he left Sicily and Linuccia, with the engagement still in place. From there on in he was confused about his desires and responsibilities. During this time he had a brief, emancipated liaison whilst studying in Como. He describes the young woman as ‘a mistress of vices and an innkeeper of her body’ – a blueprint for Liolà, perhaps. They spent every night together, and he believed she was sincere when she swore to be faithful. But it couldn’t sustain, and, whichever of them finished it, Luigi moved his studies to Germany, which marked the end of the affair.

In Bonn he met Jenny. She wore a blue mask and straw hat the night they met. He moved to her parents’ house as a lodger and befriended the whole family; however, once again a straightforward happiness eluded Pirandello. He was ‘a bird without a nest’, as he describes himself later in another letter to Marta. He couldn’t balance respect for Jenny with sexual intimacy and ended up leaving that transitory roost abruptly and rudely. He returned to Sicily, filled with guilt and feeling like ‘a stone’, to wriggle out of his engagement with Linuccia, an almost unprecedented move in Sicily at that time.

Perhaps as a consequence of these premature endings, he gave himself completely to the next proposal – his father’s suggestion of marrying shy, nunnery-educated Antoinetta Portulano from Agrigento in Sicily. During their courtship, Luigi wrote her tumbling, impassioned letters. ‘You are my sun, my peace, my purpose… you will love me, you must love me because I…’, he trails off. His outpourings embarrassed and overwhelmed Antoinetta – she didn’t know how to respond – but the marriage went ahead, and they had a few timid but content years together in which they produced three children. But after a financial disaster in which Pirandello’s father lost all their wealth, Antoinetta had a breakdown. It prompted a lifelong journey into violent paranoia. Everything Luigi did exacerbated her condition. ‘It means the failure of any efforts to hide my misery’, he wrote of his wife’s madness. Luigi chose to care for Antoinetta at home, hoping for her healing and not wanting to give up their conjugal relationship. It was when Antoinetta finally accused Pirandello of having incestuous relations with their sixteen-year-old daughter, Lietta, that Luigi caved in and sent her to a sanatorium where she remained for forty years, well beyond her husband’s death. Lietta, traumatised by her mother’s behaviour, went away to convent school, Stefano, his oldest son, was a prisoner-of-war in Austria, so Luigi was left acutely lonely with Fausto, his youngest child, in a near-empty house.

A glutton for punishment, he later broke his heart again with an infatuation for the young actress, Marta Abba. Marta became his best friend and muse. She gave him her time, energy and talent, but not her body. They made work together, travelled, toured – he would have followed her in an agony of desire to the ends of the earth. ‘I talk to your picture when I am alone,’ he confessed to her – just as he also used to converse with his dead mother in the depths of his solitude.

So for Pirandello – for whom the sins of the flesh became and remained a vice – inventing the hero Liolà, whose every encounter is fertile, must have been liberating. He has the attributes more normally found in the protagonist’s nemesis, the competition. I laughed out loud at Liolà’s audacity when I first read the play in the British Library. It’s the opposite of Don Giovanni, where the rogue male gets his comeuppance and is sent to Hell – this rogue gets no such retribution. Far from it, it is Liolà’s new child who will inherit all Uncle Simone’s money. With the scattering of his seed, Liolà defies convention, religion and law, yet we inwardly cheer when he persuades Mita to break her marriage vows with him because at base level he is wholesome. He represents the natural forces of the world, the earthly systems rather than our man-made frameworks. He’s no ‘deviant’ but ‘pure nature’, as he puts it himself. He is rogue in the sense that he is nobody’s pet, there’s no flock he follows. He has a clear moral viewpoint: it’s just not one that society shares.

If it was the foiled longing in Pirandello for what he couldn’t enjoy that propelled the transgressive Liolà onto the page, then it is true to the spirit of the ‘son of chaos’, as Pirandello declared himself. Born in a Sicilian town whose nickname was derived from the Greek Xaos, it was a pun, but one with more than an edge of truth. ‘With his bones, if not with his head, he knows that life is ironical’, says Eric Bentley in his introduction to Liolà and four other plays by Pirandello. Liolà’s immoral intervention releases such a new burst of life in the villagers and old Simone, and such quiet pleasure in Mita, that we beam, whilst questioning our own dubious moral sense. This schism is the appeal of the play. And although Pirandello may instinctively have felt he’d triumphed in writing a comedy, its shadows are everywhere. Tuzza and Croce are isolated and ruined at the end, and even Liolà, although pleased to have served a good turn, is lonely and aching for a relationship, ideally with Mita though he’d settle for less, which he can never have. A great admirer of Liolà, which came early in Pirandello’s canon, Bentley also says that the more Pirandello became ‘a thinker the less he succeeded in being an artist’.

Richard Eyre knew immediately that he wanted to cast the play with Irish actors for the premiere production at the National Theatre in London. Not to transplant the play to Ireland, but to give us the sound of a forgotten community somewhere on the West coast while still placing it in rural Sicily. Besides the transferable characteristics – Catholicism (albeit Pirandello’s Sicily having a more relaxed form), a tradition of singing, women working, talking, getting by as best they can – the Irishness gave us the earth, heart and tongue which would be all but buried in an English counterpart. Richard was also evangelical about the Taviani Brothers’ film, Kaos, adapted from several Pirandello short stories. We, especially designer Anthony Ward, took inspiration from this film as a canvas for our Irish actors. Liolà feels more tonally linked to Kaos than to Pirandello’s other plays. It is a stirring film filled with bleak, lingering tenderness yet with bold notes of humour. The camera in Kaos gives us access to the characters’ unexpressed feelings. We accentuated these dynamics in Liolà by giving voice to some of the women’s dejection, both in dialogue and song, so the women’s songs aren’t confined to work numbers. The music, composed by Orlando Gough, leant towards the Balkan gypsy tradition for its raw soulfulness, and early on in the process we discovered how central the tarantella dance was in Sicily at this time, to help purge women of poison – or in other words, barrenness, sullenness, madness – which the community believed had arisen from the bite of a venomous spider. Scarlett Mackmin worked with the cast to evolve the tarantella in its duality – perfect for the opposing layers in Liolà – in its frenzied, trance-like, cathartic form and in its upright celebratory guise.

For all its potential to invite attack of being a misogynist play, in Liolà Pirandello gives us a stage full of women with only two central roles for men. And ultimately, to defend Liolà himself, this particular Sicilian is one baby-father who hasn’t run off. He’s the one bringing up the kids.

Tanya Ronder

English translations by Gaspare Guidice, Susan Bassnett-Mcguire and Benito Ortolani

This version of Liolà was first performed in the Lyttelton auditorium of the National Theatre on 7 August 2013 (previews from 31 July). The cast was as follows:

SIMONE PALUMBO

James Hayes

MITA PALUMBO

Lisa Dwyer Hogg

GESA

Rosaleen Linehan

LIOLÀ

Rory Keenan

NINFA

Charlotte Bradley

CÀRMINA

Eileen Walsh

CROCE AZZARA

Aisling O’Sullivan

TUZZA AZZARA

Jessica Regan

NELA

Carla Langley

CIUZZA