Raising the Dead

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 774, 21 September 1929, Page 30

Raising the Dead

Theme of New Play by Pirandello

GERM OF GREAT IDEA

“Lazzaro,” a new play by Pirandello, was produced in England recently. English critics claim that it is his best work to date. “Lazzaro” has the advantage of having come to us in a translation by C. K. Scott-Monerieff. whose treatment of Proust and Stendhal has earned for him a reputation as the fiuest translator of imaginative literature now living, writes one critic. In many ways “Lazzaro” is a less brilliant play than either “Henry IV.” or “Six Characters”: it has not in its kind the accomplishment that they had in theirs: but it marks a definite movement by Pirandello toward a directness of which he has seemed hitherto to be incapable. Its subject is the raising of the dead. It tells how a Sicilian gentleman. Diego Spina, whose religion was fanatically orthodox, was killed by a motor-car and brought to life again by a doctor who had been making experiments in reaqimation. When he recovered he did not at first know what had happened to him. When he did know, his faith was shattered by the knowledge; for, he argued, if I have been dead and am now alive again without knowledge of another world, there can be no other world, and the whole doctrine of immortality is vain. It is a weakness of Pirandello’s play that the scene of Diego Spina’s discovery of the truth and the breaking of his faith are reported and not represented oil the stage. The consequence

is that we are never fully persuaded that the discovery would have had th, effect suggested. Why did not Die,!) Spina pooh-pooh the whole affair, g aj . ing: “I can never have been dead! You have recovered me from a trance, bunot from death itself.” Alternatively if he believed that he had been dead why did he not content himself W j t K the thought, natural in an orthodox Catholic, that, for some reason which we could not explain, it had pleased God to conceal the after-life from him until the time should come for him finally to enter it? But we are told that Diego Spina was driven mad by the sudden collapse of his faith. If this question of physical reanimation were all the play, the plav would not be of much importance; but a much deeper theme is involved in it —namely, the power of man to lie spiritually born again. Diego Spina has a wife who left him long ago because she could not endure the app i. cation of his strict orthodoxy to the upbringing of their children; we are told, in a magnificent passage, how she, taking to herself the life of a peasant. was born again and became a new woman. Diego Spina has also a sou. trained as a priest, who has suddenly abandoned his vocation, but is recalled to it and to fresher and more vital faith by what happens to his father. It is this youth who restores Diego Spina’s sanity. This scientific achievement of the doctor's, he says, far from being a contradiction of the divine power, was God's miracle of which the doctor was the instrument. And “God has blinded you to the other life and makes you open your eyes again now- to this life, w-hich is His, in order that you may live it— and ah low other people to live it—toiling and suffering and rejoicing like all mankind.” So Diego Spina himseif, his son and his w-ife are all, in their several ways, spiritually born again. The trouble is that, having chosen this great and beautiful theme. Pirandello has not succeeded in isolating it. “Lazzaro” itself has many faults, but it may prove to be the precursor of splendid achievement.