[In the following essay, Fazia finds parallels between the plays of Anouilh and those of the Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello.]

“I can just hear a critic whispering into his neighbor's ear that he has already seen this in Pirandello,”¹ anticipates The Author in the opening scene of Jean Anouilh's recent play La grotte—a plotless play which has yet to be written and which depends largely on audience cooperation, according to Anouilh.

La grotte's point of departure is a fait accompli: the apparent murder of the cook. An investigation of the real cause of death ensues. The Author, a combination of Pirandello's Director in Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore and Hinkfuss of Questa sera si recita a soggetto, poses, before his audience, the problems of staging an “improvised” play. He wrangles with unruly characters and capricious stage technicians. He dramatizes the conflict between an author's illusory creation and his characters' living reality.

The Pirandello plays which may be considered as having no plot are those plays which present the problems of multiple personality (Trovarsi, Quando si è qualcuno, etc.) and those which present the relationships among life, art, and interpretation (Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore, Questa sera si recita a soggetto, Ciascuno a suo modo, etc.). These plays are developed through the actions and reactions of the characters and those with whom they come in contact, and through audience participation. A combination of these plotless Pirandello plays is what Anouilh has striven to achieve in La grotte.

In constructing their plays, both Pirandello and Anouilh generally use one of two methods. The first method is construction in true commedia dell'arte style, with much physical movement, popular joking, games, songs, and dances (La giara, Liolà, L'Uomo, La bestia e la virtù, Le bal des voleurs, La valse des Toréadors, Léocadia). The procedure is simple: the plot is exposed in direct language by the characters who exit and enter from one scene to the next either to add to the jocosity of events or to intensify the seriousness or mockseriousness of a scene. In Liolà, for example, the scenes in which Liolà appears or exits, singing and dancing with his three children, take the form of commedia dell'arte lazzi which delight the children and peasants who call for more songs and capers from Liolà, just as the commedia audiences demanded encores until poor Harlequin became quite exhausted.

The second method of play construction is the detective story style: deeds are committed prior to the opening of the play, the problem to be solved is posed at the outset and developed during the play like a psychiatric case history (Sei personaggi, Così è (se vi pare), Ciascuno a suo modo, Questa sera si recita a soggetto, La morsa, Il dovere del medico, Y avait un prisonnier, Le voyageur sans bagage, La grotte, La foire d'empoigne). The movement in these plays is mental rather than physical, the only lively scenes being those involving a crowd or group of personages whose movement is intended to contrast with the stability of the central character. The acts are linked by cerebral manipulations, as opposed to the lazzi of the first group; and the construction of the “detective” play is such that it progresses smoothly, though not outwardly serenely, towards a fixed destiny.

The better to complicate their plots, the better to play with their marionettes, the better to create theatrical kaleidoscopes, both Pirandello and Anouilh construct plays with a play within them. Pirandello employed the technique of the play within a play five times, Anouilh nine times. In some cases, the interpolated play is an actual or imaginary piece of literature; in other cases, it is improvised, directed, or evoked by the characters of the outer play. Of the first group, Ciascuno a suo modo, Questa sera si recita a soggetto, I giganti della montagna, La répétition and Colombe may be cited. Ciascuno a suo modo includes a Pirandello play within a Pirandello play. The construction of the drama is very unusual, and the dramatist himself declares at the beginning of the play that the number of acts cannot be specified in view of the unpleasant incidents that will arise during the course of the performance. The first act takes place in the ancient mansion of Donna Livia Palegari. A discussion is going on concerning her son Doro's defense of an actress' reputation against the attacks of his friend Francesco. The two friends, after each has reversed his opinions, challenge each other to a ridiculous duel. The actress in question, Delia Morello, comes to Doro's house to explain her situation and all seems to be progressing as a normal play should. But when the curtain falls at the end of the first act, it rises again immediately, and part of the theater lobby is visible on the stage. The spectators in the lobby are discussing the first act of the Pirandello play they have just witnessed. Some of the audience are irritated by the performance, others are thrilled. Among the spectators who have gone out to the lobby during intermission are Delia Moreno and Baron Nuti, who have recognized their story (which had appeared in the newspapers) being reenacted on the stage. In protest, Delia Moreno attempts to stop the performance, but before she can go backstage the second act of the play has begun on the stage that does not include the lobby, and she is forced to hear it through. By the end of this act, however, she is so upset by what she considers an insult to her private life that she runs to the stage entrange, slaps the Leading Lady, and creates such confusion that the play cannot go on, and thus ends Ciascuno a suo modo.

Questa sera si recita a soggetto is another unusually constructed play, having neither acts nor scenes, but containing a play within it. Again, the play being improvised by Hinkfuss and his company is based on “a Pirandello theme borrowed from one of his short stories.” Doctor Hinkfuss first introduces individually and by name the actors and actresses who will play the roles in Pirandello's play: Signor Palmiro La Croce, his wife, their four daughters Mommina, Totina, Dorina, and Nenè, and five young officers who court the girls. Of these five, Rico Verri the Sicilian is the only serious, gloomy, and passionate one. At the end of the first act or tableau, the mother, her four daughters, and the aviation officers are on their way to the theater to see an opera: they come directly into the “real” audience, take their box seats unceremoniously, and, meanwhile, the stage has been transformed by means of screen projections and a phonograph into the opera stage, under Hinkfuss' loud and conspicuous direction. When the curtain falls on the first act of the opera, the mother and her group go out to the lobby, and Doctor Hinkfuss appears on stage to invite the “real” audience to stay seated if they wish for there will be nothing of importance to see in the lobby, except the same people who have just left their boxes, and he assures the audience that the spectacle of set-changing before their eyes will be more entertaining. In effect (and this constitutes Act II), the “characters” in the lobby carry on very light and unimportant conversation, while Doctor Hinkfuss presents a number of bizarre scenes on the stage: an aviation field and other equally incredible creations. The audience meanwhile expresses its varying opinions of the imbroglio at every possible moment, for and against Pirandello. Act III brings the family back to their home, numerous tragic and comic events occur, and after the death scene of Palmiro La Croce a shout from Hinkfuss causes six days to elapse. At this point the actors and actresses, completely disgusted with Hinkfuss' direction, rebel and refuse to continue acting for they are tired of being marionettes. Having finally put him out of the house, they take up the story themselves. They play through to the tragic ending of the piece, and no one knows whether Mommina is really dead or not for the actress who plays her role lies motionless on the stage even after the play is over. And Hinkfuss, who had been with the electricians handling the lighting effects, returns to compliment his marionettes for their splendid tableau. Such is the unlimited fantasy of Pirandello's mind in constructing a play within a play.

In I giganti della montagna, the travelling theatrical company of Countess Ilsa have stopped at a weird villa to enact Pirandello's La favola del figlio cambiato, in an undetermined time and place, somewhere between fiction and reality.

In La répétition, Jean Anouilh's Count and Countess (stock marionettes in his theater) and their friends are rehearsing Marivaux's La Double Inconstance to be presented in the château during a banquet. It has been arranged for the diners to become players. The players will come to life like the Six Characters, and the spectators will be forced to hear them to the end.

The curtain rises on the fourth act of Colombe during the presentation of La Maréchale d'Amour, presumedly written by Poète-Chéri in honor of Madame Alexandra. At the end of Madame Alexandra's and Du Bartas' performance of the play within the play, they take their curtain calls, and then resume their natural attitudes: Du Bartas removes his wig and reverts to his coarse, vulgar speech; Madame Alexandra limps away on her cane.

II

The second group of Pirandello and Anouilh plays are those which include an unwritten play within them. The technique is obvious in Enrico IV and in Sei personaggi. The former play opens with a dramatic tableau of Enrico IV's throne room in the imperial palace, which the spectators would assume to be the setting for the play itself, were it not for certain parts of the dialogue. One actor, for example, listens to his comrades and looks around the room with amazement. Finally he bursts out in exasperation that during the entire two weeks he has been rehearsing, he thought he was to act in a play about Henry IV of France, and now he has discovered that the play is about Henry IV of Germany. Landolf, Ordulf, and Ariald feel that they are playing thankless roles in an unwritten play. Landolf, their spokesman, compares them to characters who have not found an author, actors who have not been given a play in which to perform. Throughout Enrico IV, the play within the play is resumed at frequent intervals, and its value and power are felt when the hero finally escapes into its sanctuary.

Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore is another drama of unusual construction that contains an unwritten play within it, on two different levels of reality and illusion. When the curtain rises on the first act, the Director, the actresses, and the actors are rehearsing Pirandello's Il giuoco delle parti, but this is not to be the play within the play. For shortly the Six Characters are to arrive and declare that they must play their “play in the making.” The Father explains that the manuscript and the drama are within them, and that they are impatient to play it. That the drama of the Six Characters overwhelms and dissipates the “real” play is, of course, the classic example of the Pirandellian theme of illusion versus reality.

In Le bal des voleurs, Lady Hurf is the stage director for her comedy in which she will star together with the imaginary Duc de Miraflor and his Spanish nobles. She introduces her actors à la Hinkfuss and begs them to play their roles in the commedia dell'arte style in the marionette world of her illusion. In Le rendezvous de Senlis, the professional actors Madame de Montalembreuse and Philémon have been summoned to play the roles of Georges' ideal parents, and are thoroughly instructed in their roles by the young hero. Madame de Montalembreuse and Philémon have the extraordinary power that clowns have of masking their faces with tragedy or comedy at a moment's notice. For example, Philémon, having at first completely misunderstood Georges' concept of his ideal father, disguises himself as a wrinkled, bearded octogenarian, which permits Georges to explain, in a Pirandellian vein, that Philémon must mold his role around the concept in Isabelle's mind: a character who is already half alive, because someone believes he exists.

Léocadia is a series of acts within acts, as Amanda sometimes plays the role of Léocadia and sometimes reverts to her real self. Anouilh places the young milliner on the stage of Pont-au-Bronc, a park which is filled with people whose daily occupation is to don a costume and play a fixed role. Even the plants, the birds, and the rabbits seem to be playing their roles in the fantasy.

The plot of L'invitation au château is well-known: Horace has invited an insignificant dancer, Isabelle, to play the role of a dazzling young society woman at a ball in his wealthy aunt's home. His intention is simply to dissuade his twin brother, Frédéric, from his blind love for Diana Messerschmann, the beautiful but difficult daughter of a wealthy financier. After a number of episodes which are bound to occur when the poor meet the wealthy, the play ends with Isabelle and Frédéric falling in love, and Horace feeling free to claim for his wife Diana, who has become a pauper because her father has suddenly lost all his money in a crash. To make a happy ending even happier, Anouilh allows Messerschmann's money to come back to him, doubled in amount. The deus ex machina of this plot is the improvised presentation being planned by Horace. He tells Isabelle, his star, that he is the organizer of the comedy, but that he is depending on her ability to improvise during the performance. The dénouement of this play within the play, then, furnishes the appropriate ending for this “brilliant play.”

Act II of Ornifle finds the characters dressed in seventeenth-century costume playing a scene à la Molière. Ornifle assumes the rôle of The Misanthrope, and his two private physicians, in black robes, ruffs, and pointed hats, are reminiscent of the doctors in Le Malade imaginaire. Anouilh intends the insertion of the “fête Molière” into the lives of his modern machines to be symbolic of escape from boredom, as is frequently the function of the play within a play.

The diner de têtes (the play's sub-title) in Pauvre Bitos is a performance in which players under the guise of Robespierre, Danton, Mirabeau, etc., relive the Reign of Terror. Bitos, as Robespierre, faints when he is “shot” and subsequently embodies an illusion similar to Henry IV's until, ultimately, as in Sei personaggi, the “real” Bitos fades, giving way to the character in the contained play.

In La grotte, The Seminarist, spokesman for the group of “invented” characters, as is The Father in Sei personaggi, explains in Pirandellian language that the “pièce à faire” must be played since it has already begun to be lived in the mind of the author. Once again, illusion triumphs over reality.

The play within a play, then, is an important technique for dramatists like Pirandello and Anouilh who belong to the school of the “the theater within the theater.”

But comparisons between Anouilh's and Pirandello's theatrical techniques flag without the substantiating basis of similarity of themes. Adriano Tilgher, in his penetrating studies of Pirandello's theater,² enumerates at least twenty-two themes which appear and reappear in the plays and novels of the Sicilian dramatist. Of these, the themes which seem most obviously to be present in Jean Anouilh's plays may be limited to six: the impossibility of shedding one's past, evasion, the irreversibility of time, multiple personality, the relativity of truth, and illusion versus reality.

According to the two dramatists under discussion, everyone is escorted by his past, his family, his milieu, his education, and his habits, all of which superimpose deforming traits on the original being. If persons were alone, isolated, “naked,” to use Pirandello's term, purity and love could exist, but in the world as we know it, antagonisms constantly arise between memories of past formation and present conditions.

The plot of Pirandello's play Come tu mi vuoi is well known: a Strange Lady has been living a bohemian life with a writer, Salter, and his daughter. The Lady is a dancer in a nightclub, and her friends are drunken, boisterous young men who spend their time between the nightclub and Salter's apartment. One day, the Strange Lady receives the visit of Boffi, a friend of Bruno Pieri, who informs the nightclub entertainer that Bruno has every reason to believe that she is Lucia Pieri, his beautiful, virtuous, and intelligent wife, who had been living happily with her husband until the invasion of Northern Italy during the World War. Lucia had been taken prisoner by the enemy, and nothing had been heard from her since. Hoping to escape her life of debauchery which she despises, the Strange Lady, who remembers nothing of her past or at least refuses to reveal anything of her former life, accepts Boffi's invitation to return to Bruno. She welcomes the opportunity of living a new life as the beloved wife of a respectable man. However, the Strange Lady finds that the world does not accept her new identity; Bruno's relatives hint to her that the recreation of Lucia Pieri was motivated by monetary reasons, and not by the real belief that the Strange Lady is Lucia; a diary found in the attic makes the Lady herself doubt that she could ever have been or will ever be able to be the noble Lucia; and Salter, refusing to recognize the transformation, brings from Vienna a demented woman who, he claims, is the real Lucia Pieri. The Strange Lady realizes that although she may want to shed her sordid past for a new life, those who know her will never accept the self-created being. Almost hysterical, she joins her enemies by offering proof (a birthmark) that the demented woman, and not she, is really Lucia, and leaves in despair with Salter to return to the personality that society chooses to give her and that she is unable to shed.

In 1937, when Pitoëff produced Anouilh's Le voyageur sans bagage, one might have thought that the characterization of the amnesia victim had been overdone on the stage. But Anouilh managed successfully to transpose Pirandello's play. Lucia Pieri has become Gaston, a soldier who is interned in an asylum because he is suffering from amnesia. Gaston has no “past baggage” to carry; he is perfectly happy as an amnesia victim. But presently society must interrupt this happiness, for a man with no past is frightening. Gaston is pushed into his supposed family by the philanthropic Duchess who believes that “our past is the best part of us” and by a lawyer who sees Gaston as the source of a fortune in the form of the government's pension to the family of a mutilated soldier. The stiff Madame Renaud accepts him simply because a mother could scarcely do otherwise, as does Gaston's supposed sister-in-law Valentine, whose husband knows that he had been deceived by his wife and brother. In the second tableau, we learn that the real son, Jacques Renaud, used to behave most despicably toward the cook, the chauffeur, the valet, and the maid. By this time, the indifferent Gaston begins to experience various emotions, and upon learning of Jacques Renaud's fight with his schoolmate, his sentiments toward the Renaud family are violent. The past that this supposed family recreates for him is so repulsive that Gaston refuses it and all its characters. But his refusal is treated as madness and he is told that no one can decline his past—that he must either “belong” or return to the asylum. The scene in which the identifying scar on Gaston's body is revealed, like the similar scene in Come tu mi vuoi, represents the decision of the hero. By his final act of leaving with the little English boy (to whom Gaston has confided the secret of the identifying scar), Gaston brings about the symbolic death of Jacques Renaud; he thus frees himself, if not from the vices of society, at least from a public malignity built around a man without a past and from the particularly sordid past being forced upon him.

The affinities between Come tu mi vuoi and Le voyageur sans bagage are obvious. Each play presents an amnesia victim whose past is a mystery and who is being claimed by a supposed relative for reintegration into an unfamiliar family. Both plays present the struggle of the heroes against petty manifestations of the so-called “truth” of the past—a truth which means for them the destruction of the happiness and tranquillity for which they are striving. Harassed by those who relentlessly try to force them into an undesirable past, the Strange Lady and Gaston wearily rebel. The Strange Lady's struggle ends in black defeat. She cannot shed her overwhelmingly insidious past. For Gaston, who is a little shrewder in evading his foes, the struggle ends in a form of escape, but the play remains pessimistic by the very nature of its theme.

Vestire gli ignudi is another of Pirandello's plays with the same theme of the impossibility of shedding one's past. Again, the characteristics of the play may be shown to have been reproduced by Anouilh. Ersilia Drei, governess of the child of the Italian consul to Smyrna, is a woman who, prior to the opening of the play, has led a life of successive moments of weakness. Expecting to become engaged, she had given herself to an Italian naval officer who subsequently left with his ship and later became engaged to another. Ersilia next turns to the Italian consul Grotti, but this illicit love is rudely shattered by the death of the consul's child in a fall from the balcony (due to the governess' carelessness) and the consequent discovery of the deception by the consul's wife, who dismisses Ersilia. The first act of the play introduces an Ersilia who has mustered sufficient courage to attempt suicide, but the poison has not been efficacious and Ersilia, in proportion as her body has weakened, has become stronger-minded. A noted writer has extended hospitality to the abandoned Ersilia, for, having read her story in the newspapers, he seems fortuitously to have found, in true Pirandellian fashion, “the seed of a short story.” Through her contact with the writer (who has by this time formed an idea of his heroine), Ersilia becomes aware that in the eyes of those who know her, she wears an illusory dress which covers the ugly past within her. It is this dress which she struggles to keep wrapped around her, and she distorts her story to make the dress more beautiful. But the thin fabric of her “decent little dress” will not cover her past. At the end of the play, the presence of the consul and the naval officer forces Ersilia to recognize that she cannot shed her past for a new garment acceptable to society. This time the poison takes effect as Ersilia utters her last words: “I am dying naked. With nothing to cover me, scorned, crushed. … Let me die in silence, completely naked. … Go and announce that the woman who died … died … naked.”³

Thérèse Tarde, “La Sauvage,” is the French counterpart of Ersilia Drei. Thérèse is a member of a family of poor uncouth café musicians. The sordidness of her life, corresponding closely to Ersilia's life before her attempt at suicide, is described in detail by Anouilh. Thérèse is loved, however, by Florent, a wealthy and famous pianist. Florent wishes to marry Thérèse, and although she loves him, she foresees that she will never be happy in the new, respectable milieu that Florent offers her. After much hesitation, Thérèse agrees to marry Florent and submits to the fittings for her elaborate wedding gown, the symbol, as was Ersilia's “decent little dress,” of a new life divorced from the past. But a few days spent with Florent's family convinces Thérèse that her past life is even stronger than her desire for happiness. Her vulgarity, her pathetic family, her past unhappiness will continue to haunt her, and she will be unable to forget hypocritically about them. So Thérèse leaves Florent and advances determinedly toward her fixed destiny of unhappiness with her unsightly past and no garment to hide it.

Eurydice is another Ersilia Drei, combined with certain characteristics of the Strange Lady in Come tu mi vuoi. A member of a travelling stage troupe, Eurydice one day in a train station meets Orpheus, a wandering musician. The two fall immediately in love, and depart for Marseilles, leaving their respective families behind. After the first night at a dingy hotel, Eurydice begins to reveal to Orpheus how sordid her past life has been. She tells him of the numerous lovers she has had, how one committed suicide for her, and about Dulac, the jealous member of the troupe who will probably find her and snatch her away from Orpheus. As Eurydice relates these facts, she realizes that she must leave Orpheus and his pure love. Intending to return to her group, she boards a bus which is involved in an accident, fatal for Eurydice. Death provides the enveloping mantle, and suicide the purging force, against Orpheus' belief in Eurydice's sins.

The theme contained in Jeannette's fruitless struggle to free herself from her evil attachments and the solution by suicide in Roméo et Jeannette is almost identical with that of La sauvage and Eurydice. Frédéric and Julia are an engaged couple. One day, together with Frédéric's mother, they pay a visit to Julia's slovenly family, composed of a drunken father and a sister and brother (Jeannette and Lucien), both of whom have a large assortment of bewildering idiosyncrasies. Frédéric, however, falls in love almost immediately with Jeannette, who returns his love. Jeannette's sentiment is pure within her own soul, but, in the eyes of others, it is tainted with the sordidness of her past life and the continuing insistence of one of her distasteful, middle-aged, but wealthy lovers. Frédéric realizes he cannot marry the savage Jeannette who, completely unlike her sister Julia, is the finished product of a highly objectionable family and a vile milieu. He becomes increasingly aware that he must leave Jeannette when Julia, in her jealousy, attempts suicide by poison. The spurned Jeannette then angrily accepts the marriage proposal of her wealthy lover, and during the course of the celebration at his château, escapes in order to show her white gown to Frédéric. But she sees him and Julia going off together, so she begins walking out to the sea, so far out that the tide will have risen before she can return to safety. Frédéric spots her in her symbolic white dress, goes out to join her, and the two drown together. Once more a heroine has been unable to give herself a new identity to cover an ugly past.

In La grotte, Adèle, the kitchen-maid, has been asked to baptize the Countess' baby. The Countess feels she is performing a great act of charity in descending to the servants' quarters and bestowing such an honor on Adèle. But when Adèle sees the baby, she reacts hysterically, and in a long, frenzied tirade, in which she vividly describes her dung-covered dress, symbolic of her sordid past, she shows the vanity of trying to wring out the filth in the rains falling from the Countess' upstairs universe.

III

Pirandello and Anouilh have shown, with different situations but similar development, the tragic predicament of the person who visualizes for himself an identity that will make him beloved, but who instead is victimized by a society which smears his sacred countenance.

The impossibility of being truly oneself—“come io mi voglio”—and the conflict between an ideal and the sordidness of reality lead an unhypocritical character quite logically to a decision to escape the deforming influences of his past, family, and milieu. The antagonism between the purity of the individual and a perverted or criminal society ends, for Pirandello and Anouilh, either in actual death, in the symbolic death of an objective reality, or in insanity, as forms of evasion.

In La vita che ti diedi, Il beretto a sonagli, Y avait un prisonnier, L'Hermine, Antigone, and Ardèle, escape is sought not from one's past but from an unbearable tragedy or an obnoxious society. In La vita che ti diedi, one of the plays in which Pirandello proclaims the necessity of the irrational as a means of escape, the theme of evasion is subordinate to that of illusion versus reality, but still manifest in the character and life of Donna Anna, who refuses to believe that her son is dead. Il beretto a sonagli is a deep and tragic expression of the possible solution of escape in insanity: Donna Beatrice suspects that her husband, Cavaliere Fiorica, is unfaithful to her and accuses the young wife of Ciampa, an employee of Fiorica. With the aid of the police, Fiorica is discovered with Ciampa's wife. Donna Beatrice feels free and relieved of her mental burden, but the affair has brought shame to her husband, to Ciampa, and to his wife. Moreover, Donna Beatrice is in an awkward situation herself, because the society of her day demands that she return to her husband's home and submit to his violence and wrath. In an effort to correct the situation in the eyes of the townspeople, Donna Beatrice accepts Ciampa's solution, which is to put on the cap and bells of madness and fling the truth into the faces of the people in the public square. For three months, Donna Beatrice plays the role of a madwoman. Her insanity negates the entire unpleasant incident and thus she escapes the condemning conventions of society.

Ludovic, of Y avait un prisonnier, Frantz, of L'Hermine, Antigone,and Ardèle are some of Anouilh's heroes who seek evasion from society. Ludovic, when he sees what his family has become, almost wishes he were still in jail (where he has spent almost one quarter of his life), and attempts to gain his freedom by swimming to shore from his family's yacht at sea. Frantz willingly gives himself up to the police after killing the wealthy Duchess, for he knows he will never escape society otherwise. Antigone and Ardèle willingly accept death to escape a concept of morality and duty that they cannot possibly understand.

The theme of evasion is, however, best illustrated in Pirandello's masterpiece Enrico IV. The play opens with the appearance of Henry IV's councilors and valets, in authentic costume, discussing events of the eleventh century, but soon we learn that the entire presentation is a fiction; that the man who pretends he is Henry IV has been insane for many years through the perfidious accident caused by a certain Baron Belcredi; that Henry's wealthy relative, out of pity, allows him to live in his imperial illusion, and that no one except Henry IV believes he is the German emperor. The Marquise Matilda Spina, whom Henry loved before his accident, her daughter Frida, Baron Belcredi (The Marquise's lover), and Doctor Genoni appear, with hopes of bringing Henry IV back to reality. The plan devised by the Doctor of confronting Henry with Matilda and her daughter Frida who greatly resembles her serves only to tax the strength of the hero, who rudely shocks the onlookers by revealing that his madness has been feigned for several years, and that he knows his true madness was caused by falling from his pageant horse that the jealous Belcredi had made rear by pricking it with his spur. In his anger, the pretending Henry IV stabs Belcredi to death, not so much because of the latter's wickedness as because Time has rendered the hero incapable of manifesting himself, his love, and his ideals. Henry then quickly re-escapes to his madness, the only dwelling where he may live free from society.

It is very possible that Anouilh had Enrico IV and other of Pirandello's plays in mind when he wrote Léocadia and Le rendezvous de Senlis. In Léocadia, it is a real prince, Albert Troubiscoï, around whom the theme of evasion is woven. The prince's beloved actress, Léocadia, has dramatically strangled herself to death two years prior to the opening of the play. His aunt, The Duchess, attempting to assuage the prince's sorrows, has stopped the clock of life at the Château so that things should remain exactly as they were at the time of the prince's happiness. Amanda, a young milliner who greatly resembles the dead Léocadia, is summoned to the Château to make the actress live again for the prince. But Amanda, like Frida in Enrico IV, plays her role poorly and is frightened by the strange surroundings at the Château. Finally the prince reveals that his unconsolable dream is feigned, that it is, perhaps, those who surround him who are really mad and cause him to seek evasion. The play ends happily, for Amanda comes to love the prince, and it is not too late for him to return her love.

In Le rendezvous de Senlis, the same theme of evasion involves Georges, who is rebelling against an intolerable family and wife. To escape the oppressive reality of his life, he has concocted an ideal family and an ideal friend whom he will present to the young and virtuous Isabelle. The role of his parents will be played by hired actors (a Pirandellian situation). His friend Robert (who actually is his wife's lover) will remain invisible at the rendezvous to which Isabelle has been invited. The setting at Senlis is Georges' scene of escape, and Isabelle is the symbol of the realization of an unreal world.

Both Pirandello and Anouilh, then, have chosen the theme of evasion for several of their plays, and in some cases a similarity of development between the Italian and the French plays is evident.

IV

Closely linked with the two themes discussed thus far is that of the irreversibility of time. Between the past and the present there is a tremendous abyss, but sometimes it happens that by confronting the present with a situation contrary to what an individual expects, the present suddenly becomes thrown back into the past for that individual, though not for those who know him. Such was Henry IV's predicament when, having first recovered from his insanity, he realized that the ravaging effects of life and time had continued while he remained stationary, and that the only present for him was the illusion in which he had been living during the previous twelve years. Ferrante Morli in La Signora Morli una e due returned to his wife after a fifteen-year absence in America and found a situation that he could not recognize as “present.” Such also was Ludovic's predicament when he was released from jail and found that his present was far removed from that of his family. These plays are a concentration of the vicissitudes of long years of life in the space of a few hours, and their plots are intended to show the ravaging effects of time.

In Lumìe di Sicilia is presented the same effect of a stationary past idea opposed to a scintillating present reality, the two of which can never be reconciled, no matter how intensely one strives to bring past symbols into the present. Micuccio, the peasant musician, had devoted his life's efforts to giving Sina Marnis, the peasant girl whom he loves, a singing career. After many years of separation from Sina, who has left her native village to seek her fortune, Micuccio goes to the city to claim Sina for his wife, but by this time she has become a successful cantatrice who has forgotten the relics of her past (symbolized by the Sicilian figs). Sina's old aunt Marta, who accompanies her niece on her singing tours, seems to have lost the power of measuring the time that has elapsed since she left her small village, of distinguishing true events from dreams. The peasant Micuccio, in the new, dazzling atmosphere, is rendered ridiculous by the city people who see time and events as fixed absolutes. Micuccio understands from their attitude that his present is Sina's past, and that she will never be able to partake again of Sicilian figs.

The situation is much the same in Anouilh's Colombe, Julien and Colombe, a former flower-vendor, are married. His mother, Madame Alexandra, is a famous actress. Madame Alexandra detests Julien and loves her other son Armand, because the latter flatters her and answers her every whim. Julien has come to the theater to plead with his mother: he needs money because he is going into the army and Colombe has to be provided for. Madame Alexandra offers to give Colombe a small part in her plays. Julien leaves for the army, and Colombe promptly falls in love with Armand and flirts with all the other men in the theater group. When Julien returns from war, he learns that his wife has deceived him. He renounces all, and the play ends as Julien reminisces about the first day he met Colombe (the roses in this scene are comparable to the symbol of the Sicilian figs) and how happy and pure their love was. Like Micuccio, Julien realizes that he cannot reverse the passage of time and its effects. Julien, towards the very end of the play says: “Now the story is beginning,” as though he would like to turn back and start again. But Anouilh immediately reintroduces the figure of Colombe swearing her “eternal” love for Julien, a bitter reminder that time is only relative and not eternal for humans.

La morsa is another of Pirandello's plays based on the theme of the irreversibility of time. The drama is contained not in the dire results of uncontrollable Sicilian anger, but in the demonstration of how a horrible doubt in the present is the illusion of the past and the reality of the future. The love between Giulia and Antonio, who are deceiving the former's husband Andrea, is killed by their very suspicion that the husband knows even before this suspicion is verified.⁴ Such is the time aspect of Pirandello's relativity. The speed of the formation and change of opinions, with relation to the truth of an individual, is much faster than the comparatively stationary truth. At the end of the play, having stupidly forced herself into the truth held fixed in Andrea's vise, Giulia kills herself.

Anouilh's Eurydice is somewhat similar to Giulia. Held in the vise of Orpheus' desire for truth, Eurydice cannot return to the past and liberates herself from the oppression of time by death. Only in the eternal life after death will her past and Orpheus' present be reconciled.

Finally, the theme of the irreversibility of time may be analyzed in Tutto per bene and compared with La valse des Toréadors. Martino Lori, in Tutto per bene, is a man whose entire life has been dominated by his worship of the memory of his dead wife, Silvia, and his paternal devotion to his daughter, Palma. Every day for sixteen years he has gone to the cemetery to place flowers on his wife's tomb. However, Lori abruptly discovers one day that Palma is not his own daughter, for Silvia had deceived him shortly after their marriage. The odious past is suddenly forced upon Lori with the vividness of the present. He seemingly has nothing left to live for, but he gratefully grasps at the straw of Palma's increased affection and resigns himself to the belief that all is for the best in a world where time cannot be recalled or reversed.

Old General Saint-Pé of La valse des Toréadors is another hero who must resign himself to changes in the present without attempting to revive the past. The General is a comical version of Henry IV. After having kept alive a platonic love for Mademoiselle de Sainte-Euverte for about twenty years, with the intention of marrying her after his wife's death, the General finally loses her to his young secretary, Gaston. Saint-Pé tries to convince himself that it is for the best and accepts his fate in much the same way as Martino Lori.

Antigone and L'Alouette (the drama of Jeanne d'Arc), by the very nature of their identities and by the special dramatic technique which Anouilh employs, demonstrate the theme of the irreversibility of time. In both plays simultaneously appear on the stage at the outset all the main characters in Antigone's and Jeanne's life, and the heroines themselves, each knowing full well that her death is imminent. Antigone and Jeanne see the past as the present and are unaware of the passage of time since the day they took the first step towards their doom. It is Créon and Ismène, Beaudricourt, King Charles, the Inquisitor, and Warwick who live and change with the times, and attempt to save the heroines, but Antigone and Jeanne turn a deaf ear to them in the knowledge that the hours destined for them to live will not run counterclockwise.

Pirandello and Anouilh, then, were both aware of the tremendous dramatic value of the theme of the irreversibility of time, and both playwrights developed the theme along similar lines.

V

The theme of multiple personality is a common one in Pirandello's and Anouilh's plays, and indeed in many classic and modern dramas. In 1926, Pirandello had written his novel Uno, nessuno e centomila in which the problem of multiple personality was set forth in detail. The hero, Vitangelo Moscarda, faced with the knowledge that his personality is multiple (depending on with whom he is in contact), maliciously decides to decompose these various personalities and bring forth his pure self. For those who have followed Vitangelo through Pirandello's eyes, the final true being is wholly acceptable. But for external society, the person who has thrown off the mask of Moscarda is insane and is greeted everywhere with bursts of laughter. From behind the discarded mask, a sorrowful visage appears that now no longer desires to identify itself with a name and therefore is a nonentity to the world.

A little of Vitangelo Moscarda exists in almost all of Pirandello's and Anouilh's characters. All the allusions to the discovery of one's multiple personality and the various reactions to this realization—sorrow, bewilderment, comprehension, shame, etc.—are too numerous to mention. A few examples will suffice to illustrate these reactions. A young lady in Ciascuno a suo modo is ashamed to see herself change:

How am I? I don't know any more. … I feel only mobility and change in me. Nothing has weight any more. I turn one way and the other, I laugh, and then suddenly I hide in a corner and cry. What torment! What anguish! And I always want to hide my face from myself because I am so ashamed to see myself changing.⁵

D'Albis in La ragione degli altri is not the least startled when the heroine of the play reveals that she curiously feels she is not the same for herself as she is for others. D'Albis understands that the more inner lives we have, the less we realize how we look from the outside. Fulvia in Come prima meglio di prima is frightened by the realization that she is not “herself.” She is one person as the mother of her first child, another as the mother of her second child. Martino Lori is faced with an image of himself that he does not recognize and is disgusted and horrified by that image. There are few Pirandellian plays without at least one character who keeps ever-present to the spectators the awareness of the multiplicity of our personalities, and who reminds us that we are one, no-one, and a hundred thousand.

One of the most striking multiple personality characters is Evelina Morli of La Signora Morli una e due. Evelina had married very young, and was gay and carefree like her husband Ferrante. After five years of marriage, however, her husband left her and their small son, and when the play opens Evelina is legally married to Lello Carpani, a serious and reserved lawyer. Evelina gives birth to a daughter, and gradually she becomes silent and subdued under Carpani's influence. After fourteen years, Ferrante returns from America to claim Evelina and his son. At first furious upon seeing him, Evelina slowly revives her love for Ferrante and her former vivacious personality. She feels horror when she discovers two persons in herself and in her first husband. Ultimately, morality and society require that Evelina remain with her second husband and daughter, and by accepting these dictates Evelina assumes still another personality—that of a perfect mother.

Strongly resembling Evelina Morli is Amanda in the scene of Léocadia where the young milliner rebels against the contrary personality of an actress that she is forced to assume. Anouilh is obsessed by the problem of changing personality in L'Invitation au château, where the twin brothers Horace and Frédéric seem to be playing the game of split personality. André Bitos (of Pauvre Bitos) has the personalities of a studious schoolboy, a public prosecutor, and a Robespierre-like terrorist. During the play, Bitos is obliged to defend all three aspects of himself, and in the end he is unsure of who he really is.

But Anouilh's most memorable play on the theme of multiple personality is Le bal des voleurs. Lady Hurf and her two nieces are bored at their summer resort. Three thieves in the neighborhood lend some activity. They pretend, in order to enter Lady Hurf's quarters, that they are Spanish nobles. Lady Hurf plays their game. She entertains them lavishly, pretending to recognize them as her old friends. Her niece, Eva, who is being courted by the boring DuPont-DuFort fils, falls in love with one of the thieves, Hector, whom she had previously met in the park disguised as a young, honest chap. Hector, who must change his disguises in rapid succession in order to escape detection, finds that he does not please Eva in his present form but cannot remember under which disguise Eva loved him. He desperately changes his appearance several more times, only to incite Eva's mocking laughter. A ball to be held in town one evening (Le Bal des Fleurs) presents the opportunity for the thieves to raid the house while the others are at the dance. Lady Hurf has read the announcements erroneously. She thinks they will attend a bal des voleurs. All are dressed, therefore, as thieves: the Spanish nobles, Lady Hurf and her nieces, DuPont-DuFort père and fils. They are turned away from the ball because of their thieves' costumes. In the meanwhile, one of the thieves is stealing the valuables from Lady Hurf's house. Eva has escaped the group to be with the thief she loves and to help him steal. DuPont-DuFort père, having discovered that the Spanish nobles are frauds, denounces them to the police. But when the latter arrive, it is DuPont-DuFort père and fils who are arrested because they look most like thieves in their costumes and the real thieves are overlooked. Schein ist sein. The entire play is a series of masquerades which humorously stress the theme of changing personality. All the characters in Le bal des voleurs illustrate the theory exposed by Baldovino in Il piacere dell'onestà: we “make ourselves over” in accordance with the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves. Vividly illustrative of Baldovino's theory is Anouilh's La foire d'empoigne in which Napoleon and Louis XVIII, played by one and the same actor, politely alternate their entrances and exits, and Fouché, servant of two masters, shuttles obsequiously between monarch and Emperor.

Like Pirandello, Anouilh is deeply imbued with the idea of the multiplicity of human personalities and the realization that man cannot be reduced to a unity which will give him inner peace and happiness. Both dramatists are aware of the relativity of individuals' sentiments and emotions to society, to family and economic conditions, and of how these conflicts can cause the disturbing feeling of disunity. This explains why both Pirandello's and Anouilh's heroes are antisocial: they already have a sufficient number of individuals of both past and present within their one person which they must try to bring together, and consequently they cannot attempt to integrate themselves with family and society too.

VI

Così è (se vi pare) is such a well-known play and its message is so clear that no detailed analysis of the plot is necessary. It is enough to stress the theme of the relativity of truth that dominates the play, a theme which appears frequently in both Pirandello's and Anouilh's works. The curious people of a certain town require an explanation for the behavior, strange by their standards, of Mr. and Mrs. Ponza and Mrs. Frola, Ponza's mother-in-law. The villagers force interviews with the three heroes of the play, and their painstaking efforts to discover the secret of the strange family resolve into the Pirandellian question mark. The answer is that the truth is just what you would like it to be.

Anouilh may have been thinking of this play when he wrote L'invitation au château, for his purpose in confronting the high society of the château with the lowly Isabelle was to demonstrate that an insignificant dancer could appear to be the attractive niece of an “homme du monde” to those who wished to see her that way, nothing but a vulgar, earthy girl to others, and no one at all to herself. When Mrs. Frola, in the Italian play, was face to face with the Agazzi family and their friends, opinions leaned in one direction. When Mr. Ponza appeared after his mother-in-law's exits, opinions swayed in the opposite direction, and Lamberto Laudisi was always present to mock the pendulum-like nature of the people's opinions. Likewise, the truth about Isabelle's identity varied according to the persons with whom she was in contact, and Horace—the identical twin who must have observed on numerous occasions the fickleness of opinions in his double role—was in Lamberto Laudisi's position to mock those who desired to know the “truth.” For example, Horace says to Romainville, in words almost directly borrowed from Pirandello:

HORACE:
Who will believe you?
ROMAINVILLE:
Everyone, because it's the truth.
HORACE:
What does it matter that it's the truth, if it doesn't look true.
ROMAINVILLE:
Then, according to you, truth is nothing?
HORACE:
Nothing, my friend, without appearances.(6)

Another of Pirandello's plays in which the theme of the relativity of truth is predominant is Ciascuno a suo modo. The play opens with a discussion on the subject of the changing character of human opinions which consequently lead to illogical human behavior. A concrete example of this follows: Doro Palegari had defended, against the attacks of his friend, Francesco, a certain actress named Delia Morello who had caused the suicide of a promising young painter. The two friends uphold their views so staunchly that they finally challenge each other to a duel to defend their opinions. However, the intercession of Doro's mother and some reflection on the part of Francesco are sufficient for each of the two young men to change completely to the opposite point of view. The duel, then, is still inevitable. But a visit from Delia Morello in person again sways Doro who, returning to his original stand, is now to duel without knowing why. The two choral interludes and the second act of Ciascuno a suo modo, which mingle the reality of the Morello affair with an enactment of it on the stage (as has been described above), are additional opportunities for Pirandello to demonstrate the variety of human opinions. The “real” characters and the actors playing their roles all attempt to express the same truth and therefore come into conflict; the audience witnessing the play within the play disagree among themselves on the value of the presentation and of the author (Pirandello himself). Each person involved, then, is occupied with creating his own reality, ciascuno a suo modo, which inevitably leads to such discord that the third act of the play cannot be performed. Just as in life, the search for absolute truth cannot be concluded.

Perhaps the most powerful drama in which Jean Anouilh has illustrated the theme of the relativity of truth is L'Alouette. In the midst of the changing opinions of all who knew Jeanne d'Arc—her parents, the people of France, her executioners—Jeanne and her God remain a symbol of absolute truth. Antigone is a similar heroine, for whom changing opinions have no significance.

The theme of the relativity of truth cannot be limited to any particular number of plays of Pirandello and Anouilh. It seems to pervade in some degree almost all of the works of both authors. How similar to the townsfolk in Così è (se vi pare) are the villagers in Pensaci, Giacomino!, and the family of Ardèle, who are right in condemning old Professor Toti and Ardèle simply because they think they are right! And how similar to Isabelle of L'Invitation au château are the Strange Lady of Come tu mi vuoi and Eurydice who, faced with the problem of the relativity of truth, cries out: “Orpheus is telling the truth, but so is Dulac. It's too complicated!”⁷

VII

Beware of your reality, it is destined to become the illusion of tomorrow, warns the Father in Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore. The action of the play unfolds on the two different levels of reality and illusion. The Director, the actors, and the actresses rehearsing one of Pirandello's plays represent the plane of reality. The weird appearance of the Six Characters bathed in a greenish light represents the plane of illusion. Interrupting the rehearsal, the Six Characters partly relate, partly enact their tragic drama. The incomplete drama within them, which is gasping for expression, absorbs and overwhelms to such an extent the “real” actors who attempt to duplicate in their acting the drama of the Six, that the final scene, in which the little girl is drowned and the young man shoots himself, causes the plane of reality to disappear completely. Illusion versus reality. Illusion comes out victorious, the hero of the play. Anouilh's La grotte is likewise constructed on two planes—the universe of the upstairs and the downstairs kitchen—and the lighting forms an intrinsic part of the struggle between illusion and reality. In Le rendezvous de Senlis is found the same situation of actors creating an illusion which in the end triumphs over reality. Georges' ideal parents and friend, having taken spiritual form in Isabelle's mind, must be brought to life in their minutest detail by the group of hired actors. (In a Pirandellian vein, Georges tells the actors how necessary it is to give full life to these half-formed creatures. His words are almost a rewording of the Father's explanation of the actors' roles in Sei personaggi, and of Cotrone's words in I giganti della montagna.) During the course of the rehearsal for the meeting of Isabelle with his imaginary family, Georges is so completely taken up in the game of illusion that for a few moments he is able to savor the pleasure of living in a world of pure fantasy. But Isabelle, like the Six Characters, cannot take part in the game, for her reality is the unreal. When she learns of the deceit, she wonders in her bewilderment what can be true if the ideal friend is a lie. But captured by the spirit of Isabelle's fantastic illusion, Georges and the “real” friend snatch at the straw which allows them to escape the plane of reality and live in the happiness of an illusion.

Another of Pirandello's dramas based on the theme of illusion versus reality is La vita che ti diedi. In reality, Fulvio Luna is dead. He had wasted away his life by loving a woman who could never be his. For his mother, Donna Anna, Fulvio is not dead; she keeps him alive in the little world of her illusion and even succeeds in capturing within this world the woman her son loved. The entire play revolves around the necessity of constructing an illusion for oneself in order to bear mechanical reality.

The Prince and his entourage in Léocadia all live in an illusory world after the death of Léocadia Gardi, each for a different reason, but all so gripped by the power of that illusion that the reality of the outside world no longer exists for them.

The illusions of the various characters in Pirandello's and Anouilh's works are quite different for each play: for Henry IV it is the illusion of a king's power and of the cessation of time; for Martino Lori in Tutto per bene it is the self-imposed illusion that even after the collapse of his most beautiful hopes all is for the best in the best of worlds; and for Ersilia in Vestire gli ignudi it is the illusion of wearing a dress over the naked truth of her past. In almost all of Pirandello's plays there is an undercurrent of the theme of illusion versus reality. The presence of the theme is equally frequent in Anouilh's plays: Antigone scorns reality and lives with an illusory concept of her brother, Polynice—an illusion which gives her the strength to meet her death; the General and Mademoiselle de Sainte-Euverte of La valse des Toréadors fondle their illusion for almost twenty years and derive strength from it to endure their unattractive lives; and Anouilh hints that the closing scene of Colombe is the presentation of an illusion-in-the-making that will enable Julien to escape the horrible reality of the preceding parts of the play. The naïve General in L'Hurluberlu has two illusions: that a secret society of his creation will abolish the world's corruption, and that he can retain the love of his wife (twenty years younger than he) by secluding her in the country. But society snatches the General from his dreams. After the final shock of discovering a strange, horrible world of cynical amorality, the General's only recourse is to black pessimism and despair, but at the close of the play one somehow feels that Anouilh will accord the hurluberlu a return to his world of naïveté.

Further illustrations could be given, for the theme of illusion versus reality is almost inexhaustible. However, it is sufficient to have shown how this theme, as well as the preceding five themes, have been used by Pirandello and Anouilh in plays whose similarities are evident.

Since 1941, critics have been pointing out resemblances between the French dramatist's plays and Pirandellian drama, and even today the similarities remain noticeably strong. Jean Anouilh's work reveals Pirandellian influences to a greater extent than that of any other modern French dramatist. Neither Salacrou's, nor Beckett's, nor Achard's, nor Giraudoux's plays present Pirandello-like themes and dramatic techniques to the degree that Anouilh's plays do.

Notes

1. La grotte (Paris: La Table ronde, 1961), Act I, p. 11. All translations into English of this and subsequent non-English quotations are my own.

2. Studi sul teatro contemporaneo (Roma: Libreria di Scienze e lettere, 1923), and La Scene e la vita, nuovi studî sul teatro contemporaneo (Roma: Libreria di Scienze e lettere, 1925).

3. Maschere nude (Milano: A. Mondadori, 1938), IV, Act III, p. 262. Cf. George Bernard Shaw, Too True to be Good (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1934), Act II, p. 132: “But how are we to bear this dreadful new nakedness: the nakedness of the souls who until now have always disguised themselves from one another in beautiful impossible idealisms to enable them to bear one another's company … Our souls go in rags now; and the young are spying through the holes and getting glimpses of the reality that was hidden.”

4. Anouilh has treated this theme comically in L'invitation au château (Paris: La Table ronde, 1951), Act II, p. 64. Patrice Bombelles and Lady India attempt to hide their relationship from Messerschmann. Lady India: “Stand straight. Pretend we haven't seen him. Don't let him know yet whether we know that he knows.” Bombelles: “Yes, but if he doesn't know yet, don't you think that by our showing too clearly that we know he knows, he may catch on that we know?”

5. Maschere nude (Milano: A. Mondadori, 1937), I, Act I, pp. 140-41.

6. Act I, p. 20, cf. Così è (se vi pare), Maschere nude (Milano: A. Mondadori, 1937), V, Act I, sc. ii, p. 18, and Ciascuno a suo modo, op. cit., Act I, pp. 137-38.

7. Eurydice (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947), Act III, p. 388.