THEATRE: Say it With Flowers, ‘The Man With the Flowers in His Mouth’

 
For a writer who died in 1936, Pirandello still feels remarkably contemporary. In the short plays, like the newly revived The Man With the Flower in His Mouth, he hones in on emerging details of the twentieth century experience which still pattern our lives today. A woman narrowly misses the sliding doors of a train, while shopping for her family, so she decides to stay up all night in a 24 hour café until the first morning train. When she’s joined by a colourful stranger, almost a pearly king in his badges, shreds and patches, she complains to him about the frustrations of family holidays in hotels, but he’s obsessed by smaller details in the world : the universal cabal of shop assistants, with their secret to perfect gift wrapping ; the smell of doctor’s waiting rooms ; the infinite variety of strangers’ houses in their urban rows.