Pirandello e la maschera dell'identità
Pirandello and the mask of identity
Francesca Testa
Transcript
Who are we really? It is the obsessive question that runs through all of Luigi Pirandello's work.
Born in Sicily in 1867, Pirandello lived in an era of profound social upheavals.
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His central intuition is radical: there is no single, stable identity.
Each one of us wears a different mask depending on the context we find ourselves in.
In the novel The Late Mattia Pascal, the protagonist fakes his own death in order to start over.
But he discovers very soon that without a name, without a history, there is no possible identity.
The mask, therefore, is not merely a deception: it is also that which allows us to exist socially.
In theatre, Pirandello pushes this reflection to its extreme consequences.
In Six Characters in Search of an Author, the boundaries between fiction and reality collapse.
The characters burst onto the stage claiming their own existence, even though they are creatures of paper.
This metatheatre anticipates by decades the European avant-gardes of the twentieth century.
The theme of madness is equally central: who is truly mad and who is simply performing?
In Henry IV, the protagonist chooses to remain prisoner of his own mask by choice.
It is an extreme form of freedom, or perhaps the most lucid of all prisons.
Pirandello won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1934, a belated but deserved recognition.
His influence on twentieth-century theatre is incalculable: from Brecht to Beckett, all owe him something.
And yet the question he posed has not found an answer: who are we really?
Perhaps that is precisely the reason why reading him remains, even today, an unsettling experience.