“The whole play,” wrote Luigi Pirandello in a letter to his son in 1916, “is full of songs and sunshine and is so light-hearted that it doesn’t seem like one of my works at all.” British audiences, brought up on the urban sophistication of Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV and The Rules of the Game, would never guess that Liolà set in rural Sicily and written in Sicilian dialect, was by Pirandello.
Simone (James Hayes), a wealthy, unpleasant and very old landowner, has been married to Mita, a very young woman, for five years. They remain childless. He blames her; but it is he, who is impotent. Who will inherit all his money when he dies? His niece, who is pregnant by Liolà (Rory Keenan), a peasant, seizes her chances and says Simone is the father and Simone is only too willing to squash rumours of his impotence and confirm he is. His inheritance will go to this child. Liolà advises Mita that the only way she can save her marriage and inheritance, is for him (Liolà) to fertilize her. He argues that, since she is Simone’s wife, Simone will not deny the child is his.
Richard Eyre casts Irish actors, which, though not ideal for Sicily, is certainly better than casting British actors speaking in cod-Italian accents. His enjoyable production, with its songs and gypsy band on stage, benefits enormously from the charm of Rory Keenan’s charismatic performance as Liolà, a cocksure and very fertile Lothario. I suspect Pirandello’s play, however, with its Italianate greed, lust, sterility, cuckoldry, gossip, deceit, domestic violence and potential murder, is not as light-hearted as Pirandello says it is and that it is actually far more acrid and far more brutal and bitter than it appears to be in this version by Tanya Ronder.