Il gioco delle parti
The Game of Roles
Luigi Pirandello
(1918)
Plot summery:
Leone & Silia Gala are the antithesis of the happily-married bourgeois couple: Leone is cynically unemotional about his existence, and has seemingly replaced any feeling with philosophical discussions between him and his maidservant, Filippa (nicknamed, not by chance, “Socrates”), and cookery, giving his life meaning in the absence of his wife; Silia has a lover, Guido, but is plagued by the spectre of her husband, who retains his marital right to visit the conjugal home each evening for half-an-hour, even if he does not see his “wife”. Silia is capricious and superficial, and largely ignores the attentions of Guido, who is relatively straightforward in his desire for Signora Gala, and caught in the middle of the couple’s “Cold War”.
Silia eventually becomes so exasperated by her husband’s unemotional punctiliousness that she asks Guido to kill him, but the lover refuses. All the same, when the minor marquis Miglioriti stumbles into Signora Gala’s home (believing her to be a Spanish prostitute, Pepita) with three drunks, Silia sees an opportunity to rid herself of Leone: by way of Clara, her maidservant, she calls her neighbours to witness the injustice. Despite the apologies of the intruders, Silia demands a duel between the marquis and her husband, to reclaim her tarnished honour. Leone seemingly agrees, but has actually understood the deeper scheme, and leaves Guido, as Silia’s new “husband” by rights, to fight and be killed. Signor Gala, however, is left regretful in the end (perhaps his only obvious emotional response) because his reason has been trumped by emotion, and his staunch reliance on philosophy has left him with a hollow victory.
(Collected Plays. The Rules of the Game, Each in His Own Way, Grafted, the Other Son, by Luigi Pirandello, transl. by Robert Rietti, 1992).
