Abstract Antique

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

HENRY IV by LUIGI PIRANDELLO

Theater-minded people suffer from the belief that Pirandello is a complex and difficult writer. Their tendency is to approach him with excessive reverence, especially since his great theme concerns the intellectually intriguing question of the impermanence of identity--a series of masks that men put on and take off without fully realizing what they are up to. Of all his plays, Henry IV is the least-often produced and the most-often referred to as his masterpiece. This stately revival suggests plenty of reasons for the former condition, few for the latter contention--and may even tempt revaluation of his status in the modern theatrical pantheon.

To summarize Henry is to cruelly criticize it. A man dresses up one day as an 11th century German emperor and on the way to a masquerade is thrown from his horse, bonks his head, and for 20 years thereafter assumes the identity of the character he was impersonating. As the play opens, his friends hope to shock him back to sanity.

Henry, however, has anticipated them. Eight years ago, his brain cleared, and he has been quite consciously sustaining his impersonation ever since. He believes that everyone is a role player, and that it is less hypocritical to admit it--at least to oneself--than to keep up the pretense that public personas have anything much to do with true natures.

Who, then, is sane? Who is crazy? Who cares? Pirandello's paradoxes are too thin--and at this late date too familiar--to sustain the weight of words he thought were required to explain them. Bemused by abstractions, he neglected to write characters who have life and interest in their own right.

In the title role, Rex Harrison's agile mind and supple body have congealed into a sort of rep-company regality. The querulous eccentricity that has illuminated and humanized his portrayals of kings, popes and other men of power in the past is missing here. After the first Broadway production of Henry IV (1924), Critic Stark Young suggested that it might simply be beyond the power of Anglo-Saxon actors. Maybe so. But the impression now irresistibly arises that this is one antique that has not withstood the test of time.

--Richard Schickel

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