THE RULES OF THE GAME by Luigi Pirandello
Translated by Robert Rietty and Noel Cregeen
Venue:  Haymarket 1982
Directed by Anthony Quayle

The joy of Pirandello's The Rules of the Game (Haymarket) is its undeviatingness, its straight-aheadness. It shows one man setting a trap and another falling into it, with no hope of escape. Or one man falling over a tripwire which another has drawn absolutely taut.

Italy in the Twenties. Wife takes lover. Husband, apparently complaisant, lives downstairs, popping up every now and then to see how they’re getting on. Wife is fed up with both men, but husband’s imperturbability at least interests her. She wants to smash it. A group of men-about the piazza enter her flat thinking it to be a brothel. Their leader is a famous swordsman. She demands husband challenge him to a duel. He does so; makes lover his second. At the last moment he steps aside leaving lover to face music.

The fascination of the play is that the husband never seems to do anything. He is a devoted cook, but that is his only activity. The lover, Guido, tries to talk him out of the due1; then exasperated makes the conditions more stringent thereby sealing his own doom. It is unfortunate for the actor that Guido’s change of heart takes place offstage. On stage he is just a punching-bag for the married pair. Stephan Chase in this production gives him a dumb conventional decency (one way of explaining his acquiescence at the end) but cannot bring him to life.

Meanwhile Leonard Rossiter is giving a compelling, painted account of cuckolded Leone. He enters his wife's boudoir humble but curious. At the National some years ago Paul Scofield played this character as the all-time lounge lizard, too lazy to seem dangerous. Mr Rossiter though in a brown smoking jacket, is more of an alligator. Obviously he can bite, so it’s odd that nobody notices it: strange, too, that people are not alarmed by the permanent sneer in his voice. Mr Rossiter, bending obsequiously backwards from the waist, lets you feel every moment of his humiliation, and he is in his element when the trap finally closes, but he narrows the play.

Much remains though; and Mel Martin, though running out of steam in the last act, is silkily excellent as the all-round bored wife, stirred into excitement by the men who want her to dance naked in the square, repressing her feelings, taking them out on her more immediate menfolk.

I suppose an Italian actress would be steamier, or maybe that's jst a British fantasy. I never saw the Italian production of this play that came to a World Theatre season in the Sixties, but those who did have apparently never got over it. We are always told that Pirandello is a more passionate playwright than he seems and he would he a prime candidate for the old National Theatre practice of letting European directors loose on British actors. This play, though funny and ruthless, looks currently a bit prim.

Still, at least its symbolic elements - mainly to do with eggs - are ignorable; Pirandello poked fun at them himself in Six Characters in Search of an Author  (a much inferior play incidentally, based on the idea that people have difficulty distinguishing between theatre and life; you have to be a playwright,  or  otherwise  deranged, to find that interesting).  Leone, who says that he does his utmost to exist as little as possible, is an alluring figure and very believable; sure as eggs is eggs.