Through the coexistence of the story as the background to the birth of his characters with the scenery and the strong dialogical style that can be perceived in his novels, Pirandello discovers the theatre almost unexpectedly.
This achievement comes at the end of an ideological search by Pirandello, a search that highlights an inalienable need, the creation of characters without an author, who play the roulette of Chance and act in an apparently fully independent manner.
We may wonder what the features of Pirandello’s characters are. Within realistic choices, such as the time dimension and the middle-class aspects, the dramatist decides to put his characters in grotesques situations, on the verge of tolerable pain (not so much from a physical but from a spiritual point of view); we have people who are unable to free themselves from the social obligations related to appearances and are often doomed to solitude or else to the mocking laughs of their fellow townsmen. This is the real tragedy of Pirandello’s characters: the inability to attain the long-awaited freedom, owing to the slavery of social prejudice.

This is what we find in "Così è (se vi pare)"- Right You Are! (If You Think So), where the author analyses everyday life, and perceives the impossibility of grasping the truth, since the interpretation of facts by each and every character varies significantly. Secondly, what stands out is the theme of man’s solitude, of the isolation of each and every individual, who becomes a segregate and sometimes unfathomable dimension.
From a drama point of view, "Così è ( se vi pare)", appears as a choral work and the plot concerns the attempt by a whole community of people to clarify whether the madness pertains to Mr Ponza or Mrs Frola.
Written in the spring of 1917 and staged for the first time in Milan in 1918 at the Olimpia Theatre, this is a play that revolves around the attempt to discover the real identity of Mrs Ponza, with the purpose of understanding who of the two is mad. The leading figures of the small town in which the story takes place wonder what the truth is. Various theories assert themselves and are subsequently contradicted, without reaching a solution save for that in which the audience realises how relative the individual truths are and how impossible it is for mankind to get to really understand the essence of things. In a small-town middle-class context, where the desire to know the facts leads to gossip and to women’s morbid curiosity, the place’s minimum bureaucracy leads to the conclusion that the Prefect must indeed know the truth about this convoluted situation.
Characters’ entrances and exits follow one another with a pressing rhythm, with mutual charges of madness; even the confrontation between Mr Ponza and Mrs Frola leads to nothing, and each party sticks to its own position. A solution is expected in the third act from the “questioning” of Mr Ponza’s wife. However, the truth that is sought does not emerge, and this “investigation” remains unresolved, with no victory on one of the two “suspects”’ sides.
Mrs Ponza continues to be at the same time the daughter of Mrs Frola and the second wife of Mr Ponza, just as each of the two parties believes, and at the bottom of the text she states: “I am the woman I am believed to be “. From this statement we can understand the tragedy of the madness that Mrs Ponza wanted to conceal to the eyes of the world, by playing the double role for her two loved ones and existing insofar as she is believed by her husband and by Mrs Frola, in the manner that each person may wish to take her as such.

The three act play Il piacere dell’onestà – "The Pleasure of Honesty", also dates back to 1917 and was successfully interpreted by Ruggero Ruggeri, who on the other hand did not stage Così è (se vi pare), and apologised for this by saying that he did not have the right company for this text. In fact, he preferred to stage a play in which his skills as a spotlight-chaser may emerge, rather than a choral play.
Indeed "Il piacere dell’onestà" is juxtaposed to "Così è (se vi pare)", since it is obviously closer to the traditional theatre, to stage parts that a broader and more clear-cut for the leading man. The story dwells on a forced and “unconsummated” wedding: Baldovino has to marry Agata, made pregnant by marchese Fabio, who is already married to a woman who cheats on him. The wedding is aimed at giving a surname to Agata’s child, and at allowing the relation between the two to continue in future. Baldovino, who is viewed as a loser and a bad lot, appears to be a very suitable choice in this case; he accepts to pretend to marry Agata, but at the same time he decides to abide by honesty and a rigid moral code.
Once the child is born, the woman no longer wishes to be in touch with the marchese, who on the other hand plans to trap Baldovino, whom he now feels is almost a rival with respect to Agata. But marchese Fabio’s plan fails. Agata, who has for some time now understood the compassion and real nature of her husband, respects him and intends to follow Baldovino, as a real wife, wherever he goes. In these two drama texts, Pirandello gives a hint of the ultimate purpose of the human condition: man’s everlasting isolation from others and from himself, a prisoner to convention and absolutely unable to reverse the situation.
This is where the real cause of pain lies for Pirandello’s characters, as they live as defeated individuals in an illusory reality. It almost seems as if the author is trying to tell us that the truth does not exist; if anything, we witness the frustration of truth in the shattered self of each character.
However, there also is an opportunity for redemption, as in the case of Baldovino, who has spent his whole life cheating and exploiting other people’s misfortunes, with no moral restraints or emotional drives.
However, the mask he had created and worn up to a certain point in his life drops miserably: Baldovino finds himself involved in the human energy of affections and of a radical redemption choice in a yearning for Good.
Translated by interpres sas