Madness, History and Sex

Abstract

The setting of Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists in a lunatic asylum makes the play reminiscent of two other key works in twentieth-century literature, Pirandello’s Enrico IV (Henry IV), and Evelyn Waugh’s 1935 novel, A Handful of Dust. In the former, first performed in 1922, an aristocrat is condemned to continue with a pretence of madness which has already lasted for 20 years in order to avoid being put on trial for murder, and in the second, a comparable fate overtakes the wealthy British landowner, Tony Last. He ends his days as a prisoner of an illiterate lunatic in the depths of the Brazilian jungle, unable to escape because of his ignorance of the terrain, and compelled to satisfy the obsession of his captor by endlessly and repeatedly reading aloud to him from the works of Charles Dickens. The novel represented, Waugh was later to remark, ‘all that he had to say about humanism’,¹ by which he seems to have meant the belief that man could save himself by his own efforts, unaided by God.

Madness in the theatre and the novel: Pirandello and Waugh.