The Man with the Flower in His Mouth

The Man With the Flower in His Mouth (Italian: L'Uomo dal Fiore in Bocca [ˈlwɔːmo dal ˈfjoːre im ˈbokka]) is a 1922 play by the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello. It is particularly noteworthy for becoming, in 1930, the first piece of television drama ever to be produced in Britain, when a version was screened by the British Broadcasting Corporation as part of their experimental transmissions.

The play is a one-act "dialogue", derived with small variations, from the novella La Morte Adosso (1923). The dialogue takes place in a bar, late at night, between a man who is dying of an epithelioma ("il fiore in bocca") and a peaceful businessman who has missed his train. In other words, between someone who intensely lives the little time left to him and someone who is rich with time to spend idly and irresponsibly, waiting for the morning train and entirely absorbed by the banal contretemps.

The exceptional nature of the moment, for the man who feels death upon him--to use Pirandello's phrase--and the normality of it, for the one who is absorbed in the usual affairs of life with its small daily commitments, mark the two ends of the dialectic which is animated in the grand soliloquy of the protagonist.

He lucidly analyses his last sensations on earth, evoking scenes of common life, particulars of a quotidianity which are receding from him irremediably and which, for this reason, make precious the memories of even the most trivial events. In the solemnity of his solitude, he seems to have gained unexpected awarenesses of the life that is leaving him and of death. With no sense of regret or repentance, he almost seems to bitterly enjoy his unrepeatable experience marked by the echo of the end, which allows him to dedicate himself with interest to observing the anonymous life of others, in order to grasp its sense.

The BBC had been experimenting with John Logie Baird's primitive 30-line television technology since the previous year, running test transmissions both from Baird's own premises and from their own radio headquarters at Savoy Hill. In the summer of 1930 it was decided that a drama should be produced as a new test for and demonstration of the medium, and The Man With the Flower in His Mouth was selected for use because of its short length of around half an hour, its limited cast of only three characters and its confined setting.

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