Lyttelton theatre, London
Richard Eyre's staging of the lusty Pirandello village comedy is nuanced, yet its Irish accent is ultimately discomfiting
This play by Luigi Pirandello is not what you expect of the old master: it's rural, comic, filled with song and dance. Although Tanya Ronder's new 100-minute version retains the setting of Sicily in the early 1900s, Richard Eyre's production has an all-Irish cast. This does lead to a certain cultural confusion, but once you strip away the production's excessive exuberance, you discover an immensely subtle play about appearance and reality.
The situation takes a bit of disentangling but the basic facts are these. Simone, an ageing landowner, is desperate for a child but his marriage to the youthful Mita has failed to provide one. The only chap in the village who seems capable of producing children is the breezy bachelor, Liolà, who already has three sons by different women which his mother obligingly rears. So when Tuzza, his latest conquest, gets pregnant, she and her mother decide to claim that Simone is the father in the hope of inheriting his estate. At this point, however, Liolà decides to intervene in ways I leave you to guess.
In the past, the play has been damned as misogynist for its supposed celebration of Liolà's reckless fecundity. But Eyre's production shrewdly avoids that trap: in Rory Keenan's performance, Liolà becomes not some Sicilian Zorba the Greek but a slightly sad figure who'd like a wife but who ends up steeped in the solitude of the instinctively promiscuous. Far from being a hymn to the phallus, the play is, as Eric Bentley pointed out in a masterly analysis, a prefiguration of Pirandello's recurrent theme that appearance may be more real than reality: Simone, as we discover, is more than happy to be seen as a father even though he, and the whole village, knows it's a lie.
All this eventually emerges in Eyre's production, which starts with a lot of peasanty overacting but which eventually achieves the right note of rueful comedy. It yields good performances from James Hayes as the crusty Simone, Lisa Dwyer Hogg as his hapless wife and Aisling O'Sullivan as the village termagant. I enjoyed the evening but it left me with a question: isn't it slightly patronising to treat Ireland, as we so often do, as a handy stand-in for any rural community, whether it be in Sicily, Spain or Chekhov's Russia?
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