Pirandello

A couple of months ago I wrote a short play called "The Return of Lady Bracknell". An amateur group is rehearsing Oscar Wilde's play "The Importance of being Ernest" but the woman who is billed to play Lady Bracknell is ill. There's a knock on the door and who should be there ready to take over the part? None other than the real Lady Bracknell.
But of course she isn't real. She never was real. She's a charcter in a play so she can't be real.
However, after some perverse reaction to her presence, the group accepts her and she plays in their performance (the "Handbag Scene" of course).
It didn't worry me that a fictional character becomes real suddenly. The play was a joke. I think it works. At the end of the play she disappears and the group talk about their next production - "The Hound of the Baskervilles". Needless to say a character from that famous novel is ready to appear. I won't tell you which one. You may guess it correctly, you may not. It's not so obvious as all that.
I wonder if Pirandello had a similar thing in mind when he had his six characters introduce themselves to a producer saying that they are in search of an author.
My play is a joke play. Pirandello's has been given the honour of being taken seriously: a play about reality - what is it? And so on.
Lloyd Evans in this week's Spectator has a real bash at Pirandello and at the play "Six Characters in Search of an Author": "Pirandello, the master of pretentious bombast," he writes, "is perhaps the most talent-free of all Nobel laureates."
I have never understood what the play is trying to say - if anything. It is a serious play not a joke play like mine and it has been taken seriously by critics over the years.
I have seen one production of it and I found it fascinating. This was an amateur production in Cardiff by a very good group, done about thirty years ago.
I have read that the production Evans saw is the one that started life out in Chichester this year and has been panned by both lovers and haters of Pirandello. I think if Lloyd Evans saw a more traditional version of the play he would be surprised to find that the play works very well.
Sit there and let yourself get involved with the characters and you'll find the play as fascinating as I do; but don't think too much about whether it "analyses the relationship between fiction and reality."
My play doesn't analyse anything. It's done for laughs.
O yes, and the character from Conan Doyle's novel that turns up at the end is .... the hound.