NOBEL PRIZE AWARD

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19953, 10 November 1934, Page 17

NOBEL PRIZE AWARD

ITALIAN PLAYWRIGHT GAINS COVETED HONOUR United Press Association—By Electric Telegraph—Copyright (Received November 9, 5.5 p.m.) STOCKHOLM, November 8. The playwright Luigi Pirandello has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for 1934. Luigi Pirandello, the Italian dramatist and novelist, is a native of Sicily. Many of his plays are now being played all over the world, but it was not until 1922 that he secured any real measure of recognition outside. In 1930 Pirandello sold his villa in Rome, divided all he had among his three children and set out for the United States, where he hoped to find a spirit of youthfulness. He said he could no longer tolerate Europe, as youth had disappeared there and even babies were born old. In England he had found only one young man like himself—Bernard Shaw. He had decided to work for the talking pictures because he wanted to keep young. His only idea of happiness was writing, and when he stopped writing he would die. He worked five hours a day, during which he smoked 120 cigarettes. When he had finished all the films and plays for which he was under contract in America, he would retire to write his masterpiece, a novel of vast proportions called “Adam and Eve.” They would be the last two people on earth and would have a son and daughter. These two must marry, if the world was to be repeopled. Adam and Eve with their load of conventions were a check on the primitive instincts of their children, who ultimately killed their parents. A mong Pirandello’s plays are "Clothing the Naked,” "Lazarus” (produced at Huddersfield by A. Warelng), “O di uno, o di nessuno” (To one or to no one), which concerns a dispute over the paternity of a child, “Questa sera si recita a soggetto” (To-night we will practise character acting), “Gli dei della montagna” (The gods of the mountain), “L’amica delle moglie” (The wives’ lady friend), “Diana la Tuda” and “Come tu mi vuoi” (Whatever you wish me to be), based on the famous Bruneri-Cannella case of undecided identity which puzzled the Italian legal world for so long. This was made into a talking film in which Greta Garbo appeared. Among the plays given in English versions are “And that’s the Truth,” “The Vice,” “The Mock Emperor,” “The Man with the Flower in His Mouth” and “The Life I Gave You.” His novels include “The Old and the Young,” “Shoot,” a tragedy told by a cinema operator, and “Uno, nessuno e centomilia” (One, none or 100,000), a study of a man obsessed by the discovery that he has many divergent personalities.