I have been asked many a times, partly for being an author and partly due to my voracious reading habits, what is the most difficult form of writing. I have tried my hand in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, travelogues, narratives, biography, criticism, corporate content but I never had the courage to write anything on drama. Drama is a different version from screenplay, mind you. Drama is more on depiction of character, conditions and activity through dialogue, monologue or proclamations. Not many authors were prolific dramatists. Mark Twain for one had regarded writing drama as the apical form of writing. How many people know that Adolf Hitler was a prolific writer of drama? Also I doubt whether people know that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had first debuted the writer’s fraternity through his plays and drama.
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) may be regarded as the pioneer of the new school of the dramatists. An Italian poet, novelist, essayist, short story writer and dramatist, Pirandello said: “I am the son of Chaos”. He has often been called the leader of the Theatre of the Grotesque. The term ‘Grotesque’ is usually applied to the tragic- comic Italian drama that brings into sharp focus the glaring contradictions of the society. The contradictions have an element of grotesqueness about them. The dramatists of this school had recourse to irony and laughter while displaying the conflict between the mask and the face, the illusion and reality.
Pirandello will go down to posterity for his novels and plays as well as poems and essays. To his credit there are seven novels, two hundred thirty two short stories, forty four plays, four hundred pages of poetry and four hundred pages of full- length critical essays. But it is as a playwright that he will be remembered by the war-torn suffering humanity Of the forty four plays his masterpieces are undoubtedly Right You Are, Six Characters in search of an Author, and Henry IV. “The main thrust of the philosophy in these three plays”, say John Gassner and Edward Quinn, “is to undermine the traditional antinomy of appearance and reality with the nihilistic paradox: Appearance is reality, there is not anything more to life than meets the eye. From which an ethic is drived: Be content with what meets your eye, be tolerant of what meets other people’s eyes, and don’t ask more of life. A defeatist metaphysic thus joins hands with a sad belief in the few human realities that are left when God and an intelligible universe are torn away – such realities as compassion and family piety”.
Pirandello is unmistakably a pessimist. He believes that everything is transitory, and reality exists at a particular moment of time. His plays have become cerebral theatre, and the playwright investigates the human mind with the keen scalpel of analysis. He himself poses the question: “What do we really know of other people? Who they are… how they are… what they do why they do it.” Pirandello’s pessimism does not well out of hatred. What he feels is that there is so much beauty in the world, and yet it is irrelevant to the human drama.
In old time England, there used to be the drama syndicates or the drama groups who wrote and acted in plays that reflected different facets of society. In India too, major actors have graduated from FTII (Film and Television Institute of India) to become stage artists. The “Rangamanch” (stage) has shaped the future of many cine/television artists. However, these acts of drama had to be carefully scripted by gifted writers some of whom could never step out of the shadows of oblivion to the limelight of honour. However, these are the writers who have shaped the career of many budding actors and directors. The iconic pair of Javed Akhter and Salim had also tried their hands in several plays. According to them writing drama needs a person to get transferred into a different mental state to feel and write through the characters.
Drama is a difficult genre to write upon. Shakespeare with hid different versions of playwright or Christopher Marlowe with his immortal “Doctor Faustus” had raised the bar for writers in this genre, years ago. However, Samuel Beckett with his “Waiting For Godot” had broken through all barriers to create new records of his own. The human characteristics have been portrayed in a canvas of reality as never before and the settings used in the play gives an evidence of the intensity of thought and observation of the author. Portrayal of authentic emotion through dialogues is not an easy form of writing and this is the genre in which Samuel Beckett had created a niche for himself sand mind you…..Samuel Beckett is no Amazon bestseller.
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SATADAL LAHIRI