Pirandello's Royal Nut
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage PIRANDELLO'S ROYAL NUT BY ALBERT BERMEL Rex Harrison is not an actor whom one instinctively thinks of to undertake Pirandello's Enrico Quattro. But it seems he has had his eye on that...
...It suggests that Henry considers the outside world to be mad while he, cloistered in his medieval role and rule, is sane...
...For instance, Pope Gregory is said to be a "pagan" who practices witchcraft and brings dead people back to life, while the "Dionysian" psychiatrist does more or less the same thing theatrically when he arranges for the framed images of Henry and Matilda to come alive...
...But why does he lose control...
...Whether Henry is mad, or ever was, does not much matter— technical definitions of madness mean little, anyway...
...She will love him...
...the lady's real name also happens to be Matilda...
...His sister, who owns a remote but spacious villa, allocates him some "royal" quarters where he can continue to live out the role with the aid of seven costumed retainers...
...His plan comes to pass...
...As an event the production works hard for veracity...
...if the supporting actors appear mostly competent but muted...
...Why...
...its wooden benches may show wear...
...Faustus performs wonders before the Emperor of Germany...
...At the Morosco Theater David Storey's storyless The Changing Room details the doings of a British Rugby League "fifteen...
...Then he blows everything by committing murder...
...In Marlowe's play Dr...
...She married a count and now has a grown-up daughter who is the spitting image of the Matilda of 20 years ago...
...Henry may be the father of Matilda's daughter...
...He says, "One cannot go on being 26 forever...
...If you wish...
...All the "philosophical talk" that Pirandello injects into his dialogue, far from being abstract discussion, is conflicting evidence in a complicated whodunit...
...The modern and historical stories do not quite parallel each other, although we notice tantalizing correspondences which invite us to view the modern fiction through the aperture of the partly fictitious history...
...if the production, in other words, ricochets off the characters' passions instead of meeting them head-on, there is still a great deal of reward in watching this chilling comedy unwrapped by people who care about it...
...But the scheme misfires, and leads indirectly to the bizarre climactic murder...
...Underplaying in this role makes the play falter, especially at the tragic end when we see that Henry has himself scotched his hopes and lost his chance of breaking out of fiction and back into life...
...She will pity him and go on to recognize that he was not mad, but a "natural" king...
...cracks his head, and comes back to consciousness imagining himself to be the 11th-century monarch...
...The psychiatrist, whose first name is Dionysius (he is described as having a "fine satyr's face"), cooks up a diabolical scheme for shocking Henry out of his madness: He will confront him with the daughter and nephew dressed as Henry IV and Matilda of Tuscany and stationed inside portrait frames...
...Yet Henry unexpectedly stabs and kills a man—who was once his rival in a love affair and may have caused his horse to rear up—then retreats back into madness...
...On this point the play proves evasive...
...Harrison and Herlie wear the florid, masklike makeup called for by the text, but no attempt is made to follow through with this device...
...the play, asking not who did it, but why, drops more clues than the most attentive spectator can handle...
...This girl is engaged to Henry's nephew, the one who wants him straightened out...
...Because, it seems, he is tired of playing his limited role...
...The setting by Adb'el Farrah has a quaint and aptly seedy look...
...But as new fifteens come and go, seeking temporary shelter, it fails to accommodate itself to them...
...if the director Clifford Williams has opted for overexclamatory speaking and proper stage decorum...
...Critics have not been slow to take up the hint...
...But it is neither as history nor as half-baked metaphysics that this play—or any play—is impressive...
...Henry was once in love with a woman who, in the pageant, played Matilda of Tuscany, the King's enemy...
...Critics usually fasten on to the main story and revel in its metaphysical high jinks: A young Italian playing Henry IV of Germany in a pageant is thrown from his horse (was the animal goaded...
...Yet if he tries to escape, people led by Belcredi will mock and discredit him...
...A murder will be done...
...He always knew he was not the German Emperor...
...he loves the girl on seeing her for the first time, since she is the replica of the woman he loved 20 years ago and has dreamed of ever since...
...As the play progresses, however, "Henry" (we never learn his real name) confides that he has recovered and has been feigning insanity for the past eight years...
...Clifford Williams settles for reticence...
...Should this piece of information color our understanding of her modern counterpart...
...Twenty years later the sister has just died and her son hires a psychiatrist to find out whether his uncle's identity muddle is penetrable or maybe curable...
...They will step out and startle Henry into his wits...
...it may be a fake madness that lets him avoid the pen-airv for murder...
...To me, an Englishman born, its truth is compromised by north-country dialects that keep straying off-center and into the Welsh, Scottish, and Home counties...
...Behind the murder lurk other shadowy happenings...
...Seeming to be mad he will fascinate Matilda...
...am not trying to shake the net of ambiguous wrinkles out of Pirandello's motley fabric (if that were possible), but to emphasize that the play permits a lot of scope in the reading...
...but David Hurst's avuncular psychiatrist, bewildered by his own reasonable personality, is a deft piece of comic portraiture...
...It also offers several further mysteries...
...But it seems he has had his eye on that tricky role for years and, as a big marquee name, has made possible the current Broadway presentation of Emperor Henry- IV at the Ethel Barrymore Theater...
...He chose to remodel the lat-ter's biography because, like Faust, he lusted after youth (the Henry IV he plays is 26) and power and the admiration of others...
...his life has been slipping away...
...The superb Pirandellian paradox is that when he loses control and puts a knife into the stomach of his foe Baron Belcredi, who had always refused to take him seriously, he does so at the very moment the Baron is accusing him of not being mad...
...This may be a genuine attack induced by the interferences in his kingly routine...
...its overhead pipes may rust a bit more...
...The inner subject is the changing room of the title...
...It takes place in the 11th century and has to do with the original Henry IV of Germany, the actual Matilda of Tuscany, Pope Gregory VII, other historical personages, and a few quasi-historical ones invented by Pirandello...
...But as a spectacle of activity and shticks, with the director Michael Rudman serving as traffic cop, it has a certain—well, persistence...
...The gray-green paint of this overgrown closet below ground level (designed with a flair by David Jenkins) may peel...
...After reading and seeing it seven or eight times, while it keeps getting broader, richer, and more of a mind bender, I hazard a new outline that might go roughly as follows...
...As if all this were not enough, another story continually intrudes...
...An allegory...
...In addition, the historical Matilda interceded for Henry IV with the Pope, though she had, up to that time, been opposed to him...
...The impending marriage of daughter to nephew would then be incestuous, too...
...He works a miracle, a transformation of himself, by pretense, acting...
...As a result, they seem separated from the others, two people who share a secret and present themselves to the world in false guises...
...He has one obtrusive miscasting, a Matilda entrusted to Eileen Herlie, who does not fulfill the part's sexiness...
...It draws its strength and its spell from Pirandello's gift as the finest crime writer of the 20th century, the theater's answer to Dostoevsky and Italy's answer to Sophocles...
...The unusually high-vaulted beams, adorned with a heavy overgrowth of cobwebs, could house most of the bats of history as well as the bees that swarm in and out of Henry's bonnet...
...On the relationships and borderlines between madness and sanity, illusion/fantasy and reality, role-playing and being, the play provides gristle aplenty for Kantian dialecticians—real or deluded, sane or otherwise—to mumble over...
...It must function as an imitation throne-room and council chamber, pre-Renaissance Italy and Germany in a confined space...
...If his interpretation is a beautifully polished, lightweight one...
...Williams defers more to the presence of Rex Harrison than to the fluctuations of the hero's desperate histrionics...
...It tempts a director to insinuate his own ideas, a temptation he ought not to resist so long as he gives the lines and stage directions an even break...
...For having abandoned him she will feel remorse, and that will draw her back to him, no matter how long it takes...
...They arrive one by one for the game, warm up, undress, exchange small talk, josh one another, run out on to the field, limp back muddy, bruised and bleeding, take a communal shower, sing chorally, dress again, and go home...
...Their trainer and their masseur, the club owner and the club secretary fuss over them like birds picking fleas off a hippo, while the cleaning man Harry laments the decline of the generations and wearily pushes mops and brooms across the floor...
...It does not change...
...He may also have had an incestuous relationship with his now-dead sister, in which case the nephew is actually his son...
Vol. 56 • April 1973 • No. 9
