Grice e Pirandello

 Shakespeare was in his head at this time, too, because of an interesting approach from a director and a theatre he admired, Michael Grandage at the Donmar. Grandage, who took over the Donmar in 2002, was inviting major writers to do new versions of the European repertoire. He asked Stoppard to take on Pirandello's Henry IV, first staged in 1922. Stoppard agreed at once, without even having read the play. It was a good match. Henry IV was much inspired by Hamlet, and Rosencrantz was often compared to Pirandello's most famous play, Six Characters in Search of an Author. Like early Stoppard, Pirandello had darkly comical fun with reality, enjoyed wordplay, broke the fourth wall, upended theatrical conventions and liked his characters to meditate on truth and mortality. Henry IV is a play about madness and sad-ness, written soon after Pirandellos wife was committed to an asylum.

A twentieth-century Italian aristocrat has been concussed by a fall from a horse during a historical pageant when he was dressed as the eleventh-century anti-papist German emperor, Henry IV-and has got stuck in his role. For twenty years he seems to have gone on thinking he is Henry IV.

His rich relations, to keep him pacified, have kept him in a "medieval" castle with fake portraits, courtiers dressed in period costume and visitors all adopting historical roles. The play begins with a baffled new employee (a Rosencrantz/Guildenstern type) being inducted into the charade, on the day that "Henry's" nephew, the woman he once adored, her lover, her daughter and a psychiatric doctor all arrive to try and shock "Henry" out of his delusion, with a lot of Pirandello-ish family agitation and argument.

But the joke is on them. For the last eight years, it turns out, "Henry" has only been pretending, Hamlet-like, to be mad, as a refuge from the real world. He points out that they are all as trapped in their roles as he has been pretending to be. Who is truly insane, the false madman or the society that confines him? "I'm cured, gentlemen," he concludes, "because I've woken up to my madness... Your problem is that you haven't woken up to yours, so you toss and turn your whole lives through."

Reworking Pirandello wasn't easy. "Off virtuously to bed you go, a good and faithful servant of Pirandello-and then you get up in the morning and it's as if the Portuguese au pair had been at it and done her version. You think, but this is gibberish—and go back to work on it again and again." It was a garrulous play, and he sharply tightened it-even more so after he had seen it in rehearsal, when, as Grandage put it, he clipped a wayward hedge into a more shapely form: "great topiary." As with On the Razzle or Rough Crossing, he made it as colloquial as he could. When "Henry" suddenly turns on the people hes been hoodwinking, which in one translation reads: "The clowns! Buffoons!" Stoppard has: "What a bunch of wankers!" He has fun with the psychoanalyst's lingo. "He can't quite find the point of equilibrium between ego and super-ego" is his version of (in another translation): "He is slowly readjusting himself beneath his outer personal-ity." "Henry's" lamentation on the condition of masquerade and solitude to which we are all condemned, whether mad or sane, is movingly phrased:

"Pray God you don't find out the thing that'll drive anyone crazy: that when you see yourself reflected in someone's eyes—as happened to me once—you see a beggar standing at a gate he can never enter. The one who goes in can never be you, in your closed-off, self-created world."

His version was praised as "true-spirited and boisterous," "snappy-clever and inventive." One reviewer compared the sad human story coming through the wit and cleverness to the recent revival of Jumpers. And a

"gale-force" performance by lan McDiarmid in the title role was praised as

"a master-class in the grandeur of delusions." When the play was published, he made sure Pirandello got bigger billing than he did in the blurb, and reproved his editor at Grove Atlantic, Eric Price, for inflating his reputation:

"I don't like being called one of the 2oth century's greatest playwrights. It's too soon to tell!"