Pirandello's The Mountain Giants: the magician Cotrone
Pirandello's last, unfinished myth: Cotrone, the villa of the Scalogna and the border between theatre and magic in the play staged at Boboli in 1937.
Luigi Pirandello died in Rome on 10 December 1936, leaving unfinished the play he had been working on for years, The Mountain Giants. He had written the first two acts and part of the third; the rest we know only from the account of his son Stefano, to whom his father had described the ending in his last nights. The text was first performed on 5 June 1937 in Florence, in the Boboli Gardens, directed by Renato Simoni.
The third of the myths
Pirandello regarded The Mountain Giants as the third of his theatrical myths, after La nuova colonia, devoted to the social myth, and Lazzaro, devoted to the religious myth. This third myth concerns art: what poetry is and what place it can have in a world that no longer knows how to welcome it. The action takes place in a space suspended between reality and dream, in a setting the text itself places outside time.
A company of actors reduced to poverty, led by Countess Ilse, arrives at an isolated villa called the Scalogna. The actors bring with them a play, La favola del figlio cambiato, which Pirandello himself had written earlier and which no audience has been able to love. The villa is inhabited by a group of strange characters, the Scalognati, who have renounced the world.
Cotrone, the magician
At the head of the Scalognati is Cotrone, a magician figure whom Pirandello constructs with great care. Cotrone does not practise ritual magic: his power consists in releasing the images that dwell in the mind and making them appear. In the villa dreams take material form, puppets come to life, apparitions walk through the rooms. Cotrone says he invents the truth, and he sees the villa as a place where imagination does not need to be believed in order to exist.
Many influences flow into this character: Shakespeare's Prospero, Pirandello's interest in spiritualism and mediumistic phenomena, already present in novels such as The Late Mattia Pascal, and the Romantic idea of the poet as a summoner. But Cotrone is above all an image of theatre itself, which creates worlds destined to dissolve at the end of the performance.
The invisible giants
The giants of the title never appear on stage. They are the lords of the mountain, engaged in great building works and indifferent to poetry. According to Stefano Pirandello's account, in the ending the company would have performed before the giants' servants, who would not have understood the show, with tragic consequences for Ilse. It is a conclusion many have read as a bitter reflection on the fate of art in modern society.
The play has had a long life on stage. Giorgio Strehler directed it several times, in 1947, 1966 and 1994, making it one of the emblematic titles of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. Every director has had to face the problem of the missing ending, choosing whether to stage it, narrate it or leave it suspended.
The Mountain Giants thus remains a work on the threshold: between reality and fantasy, between life and death, between magic as an inner gift and theatre as a public art. That its author died before completing it has given the play a particular aura, as if his own fate mirrored the incompleteness of every dream.