Henry IV

Pirandello's Henry IV is a rich, in tricate tapestry of past and present, illusion and reality, love, jealousy and revenge, woven around a madman-hero -- a philosopher-king on the grand scale of the philosopher-prince of Denmark. Admirably revived by the Yale School of Drama Repertory Theater, the 46-year-old play shimmers with existential immediacy.

The complex plot defies easy unraveling even in Eric Bentley's swift and supple version. In a historical pageant held 20 years before the action of the play begins in 1922, an Italian noble man (Kenneth Haigh) had his horse tripped by a rival for his mistress' favors. After the fall he went mad, imagining himself to be the character he had been impersonating in the pageant, the 11th century Emperor Henry IV of Germany. He lived in a villa complete with throne, courtiers and artifacts of the period. For the first twelve years after his accident, the pseudo Emperor lived out this illusion in bona fide in sanity; for the last eight he has done so in ironic lucidity.

A smug psychiatrist proposes to jar the supposed madman back to sanity by the ploy of having the portrait of his young love come to life in the person of her daughter. Seeing the elder and the younger woman side by side does indeed shock the pseudo Henry--to the point of stabbing his old love rival to death. By this sudden act of murder, the Emperor loses his freedom and is imprisoned in the illusions and fantasies of which he was previously the master.

The play is immensely theatrical, sensuous and intellectual. Apart from being Pirandello's greatest work, Henry IV is a fascinating precursor of the entire theater of the absurd--the anguish over existence in Sartre and Camus, the guerrilla warfare against ossified language and the mass mind in lonesco, the bleak, alienated vision of Beckett, the sense of man eternally acting a role in Genet, and the use of the stage as a self-contained universe in Pinter. In a towering display of the actor's craft, Kenneth Haigh confers unbrooked, unhinged regality on the title character while coiling the inner man into a sentient ball or pain.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.