The strangeness with Ficarra and Picone on Rai 1

One morning many years ago (I still lived in Palermo), I was in the company of Leonardo Sciascia and, suddenly, he asked me to stop the car I was driving. “Sorry, wait for me a moment,” the great writer whispered again. And he walked towards a small bookshop. A few minutes passed and I saw him return with a book in his hand which he immediately handed to me. It was a biography of Luigi Pirandello edited by a great scholar, Gaspare Giudice. “This is for you, I ordered it a few days ago. It’s fundamental, and it’s the most beautiful there is.”

This episode from my youth is probably at the origin of my film The Strangeness. In fact, that biography turned out to be crucial reading and gave me a dazzling vision of the labyrinthine intertwining of life and art that makes up Pirandello’s tortuous universe, a vision to which I still feel indebted today. Strangeness is a fantasy about the creative act, about inspiration. A journey suspended between the real life of the great writer from Agrigento and his fantastic invention. At the center is the relationship between Pirandello and his characters. Between Pirandello and Sicily, between the private obsessions of a genius and the life of a Sicilian village in the 1920s.

Some of the facts told there are true, as are some of the characters who appear there. It is true that in 1920 Pirandello went to Sicily, to Catania, to celebrate Giovanni Verga’s eightieth birthday, and that the author of Malavoglia did not want to attend the ceremony at the Bellini theatre, officiated by the Minister of Culture Benedetto Croce. It is true that Pirandello had a wife, Maria Antonietta Portolano, who in 1919 was confined in a clinic specializing in nervous diseases. Just as it is true that Pirandello as a child was looked after by a nurse called Maria Stella, a sweet and sensitive woman who told him facts, fables and rumors of the Girgenti who the writer’s work would later be inspired by.

Just as it is also true that the premiere of Six Characters in Search of an Author, on 9 May 1921, in Rome at the Teatro Valle, was stormy, not to say disastrous. As can be seen from the news, the public was taken aback by the revolutionary novelty expressed by that masterpiece, and sent its dissent to the author with the sound of “Madhouse!”, “Buffone”, and other epithets. Pirandello, contrary to his habits, still wanted to greet the public and imperturbably offered himself to his judgement. He left the theater with his daughter Lietta, openly facing the group of troublemakers who were waiting to mock him. But already in Milan, the next stop on the tour planned for the show, The Six Characters were welcomed with a triumph, and from there, little by little, the fame of the work spread unstoppably throughout the world.

With Massimo Gaudioso and Ugo Chiti we wanted to fantasize about the background to the birth of a masterpiece that changed the idea of ​​theater forever and in every latitude. Today, once the film is finished, almost as if a circle had been closed, I can say that what we imagined reveals a profound connection with an intuition of Leonardo Sciascia, contained in the collection of essays La corda pazza, where he writes: “In Pirandello there is a kind of invention of the theatre, he invents, that is, in the truest sense he finds, the theater in life, in the instinctive impetuous flow of tragedy and comedy”. And in fact, Girgenti, this is the historical name of Agrigento, was the catalyst of Pirandello’s imagination. The place from which his visions began and crystallized. And in which the idea that will lead him to the creation of the Six Characters in Search of an Author was born and fulfilled, of which Strangeness offers a hypothetical background.

From the meeting of two gravediggers, Nofrio and Bastiano, who do theater for pleasure, (Salvo Ficarra and Valentino Picone), with Pirandello (Toni Servillo) in the fateful 1920, a film emerged which I hope will be fun and mysterious, a mosaic in which the planes of reality and fantasy, chaos and order, tragedy and comedy, life and death are dizzily composed, themes crucial to life in Sicily, but valid everywhere in the world.

Obsessed with the comedy to be done, an oddity as he will tell his friends, persecuted by the crowd of characters who knock every day at the door of his imagination, Pirandello, after a series of singular events, thanks to the unconscious contribution of Nofrio and Bastiano will finally focus the explosive idea that has been brewing for a long time. A comedy in which being and appearing, the person and the character are indistinguishably confused. A reversal of the field that for the first time, ingeniously, puts the audience, the audience, at the center of the scene.

This film is a gift that Salvo Ficarra and Valentino Picone, I promised each other a long time ago. The three of us were joined by a great actor, accomplice and friend: Toni Servillo. The work was wonderful, and took place in various places in Sicily, in Palermo, Catania, Trapani, Erice, and then concluded in Rome, at the Teatro Valle.

[Roberto Andò]